Enacts Grace

Breaking bread. It's a look at hospitality in the Gospel of Luke. Family, for me, is one of the most important things in life. It doesn't matter where you've been, it doesn't matter how far you've gone, what you've done, or how long you've done it, family is family. At the heart of my family is a big old kitchen table.

Huge. Right in the centre of the kitchen. And that kitchen table is the hub of the family. It's where most of our debates, our arguments, our endless discussions, and our philosophising happens. But it's not really so much the kitchen table itself that brings that unity, that togetherness, but it's the attitude, it's the atmosphere of what that kitchen table represents.

It's an atmosphere of love. It's an atmosphere of respect. It's an atmosphere of connection and acceptance. In a word, it's hospitality. Hospitality.

In the gospel that Luke writes, he describes a very characteristic side of Jesus that the other gospels don't really emphasise. Jesus is shown to be the master of hospitality. Jesus is approachable. He's shown to be relatable. He's warm.

Now, that doesn't mean that the other gospels of Matthew and Mark and John don't describe Jesus in this way, but it's a specific emphasis in the gospel of Luke. In particular, Luke highlights Jesus' ministry happening in people's homes. In people's homes, Jesus is around a dinner table often. He's surrounded by friends.

He's surrounded by disciples. It's intimate. It's what the Afrikaners call gesellig. It's what the Dutch call gezellig. That is the essence of Jesus' ministry.

Now Jesus is constantly described to be in people's homes in the gospel. He's eating. He's drinking with them. He's teaching things around a dinner table with them. In fact, one of the interesting accusations that Jesus' enemies, the Pharisees and teachers of the law, wage against Jesus is found in Luke seven.

Jesus says, "The son of man has come eating and drinking, and yet you say, 'Look at him, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.'" A glutton, of course, is someone that eats too much, that overindulges. A drunkard is someone who drinks too much, so much so that they become intoxicated. Jesus was seriously into eating and drinking.

So much so that His enemies accused Him of doing it in excess. Jesus spent His time at dinner parties. Jesus was a party animal. His mission strategy revolved around having a long meal, drawn out with lots of teaching. It drags on into the evenings.

He did evangelism and discipleship around a dinner table with nice grilled fish, fresh baked loaf of bread, and a pitcher of wine. In fact, the gospel of Luke records nine distinct instances where Jesus was eating with people, where Jesus was teaching people around a dinner table. And as we look into the series more, we're going to pick out six out of these nine instances where Jesus is either talking about food, eating food and teaching, or just sharing a meal with people. They're all significant, however. There's a reason that Luke records them because Jesus obviously had to eat at least once a day.

They were all meaningful and it shows us something about Jesus' message to His disciples, about what it means to be a Christian. It has a tremendous impact on the gospel, how we understand Jesus, what He stood for, and what He came to earth for. The commentator actually writes in the about the gospel of Luke that Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming back from a meal. That's the gospel of Luke. The meals of Jesus represent something big.

They represent a new world, a new kingdom, a new way of thinking about things. But He gives this concept of the kingdom substance at the dinner table. The meals aren't just symbols, they're also application. They're not just pictures, they're practical applications to His message. Food for Jesus is tangible.

It's touchable. It's tastable. It's not just ideas. It's not theories. It's food.

You eat it and you taste it. But meals are also more than food. They're an occasion for friendship. It's an occasion for togetherness, for community, for acceptance. Over the next few weeks, we'll be dealing with this particular ministry approach of Jesus, and we'll be zooming in on why He says these things, why He does these things.

Well, we're calling it the Breaking Bread series, and we'll be following along several passages in Luke's account of Jesus' ministry. I just want to add a disclaimer that this is not a sermon series on food. We're not going to all become Jamie Oliver's or Nigella Lawson's or whatever. We're not going to necessarily have practical food preparation displays here or anything like that. Although if people really want that, we can get Rob to do something, I'm sure.

We're going to be delving into the ministry of hospitality, of what happens around a meal, more importantly. This morning, we're going to start it off by looking at Luke five. It wasn't easy being unpopular for a man called Levi. Levi was a tax collector. He is also known as Matthew, and we believe that he wrote the gospel of Matthew.

Levi was wealthy. He was comfortable. He was well off. His business associates were happy. His superiors were happy, but he couldn't help but feel isolated.

He would have definitely felt isolated because he was a tax collector. But Levi wasn't your average tax collector. And this is why he was so ostracised. He was a customs house official. There are two different terms for tax collectors.

The first was just the plain ordinary tax collector who collected tax on real estate, on income, from the Roman Empire's citizens. The customs house officials, however, in Greek called the mokase, collected tax on imports, on exports, tolls on roads, bridges, harbours. They collected town taxes and a whole lot of other smaller little things. It meant that there was a lot of opportunity to abuse the system. They could come up with any sort of tax, a walking tax, a Saturday afternoon tax, and they would be able to collect a little bit of something from those people.

The word mokase was associated with oppression and injustice. The Jewish people classed these particular tax collectors in the same category as prostitutes, gamblers, thieves, dishonest workers, all who lived hard lives, lawless lives. According to the teachers of the Rabbis of that time, there was no hope for a man like Levi. No eternal hope for these guys. He was to be excluded from all religious festivals, fellowships.

His money was to be considered tainted, and anyone who took his money was defiled. Couldn't take part in the sacrifices. A tax collector like Levi could not serve as a witness in court. He was a second class citizen by all accounts. Levi, however, is invited by Jesus to become His disciple.

Tax collectors who had this bad reputation perhaps weren't all that bad. In fact, I believe that Levi was a good man. I mean, Jesus did associate with sinners, but His disciples were good men. I think we can believe that Jesus chose a good, righteous man to be part of His inner circle. Levi, I think, was a good man, but he had a bad stereotype hanging over his head.

A good man with a bad stereotype. Do we have any lawyers in the house? Jesus said, "Follow me." And Levi got up and left everything and followed Jesus. That night, however, he's happy.

He's overjoyed and he throws a big lavish banquet. Lots of guests. Lots of people there. It's loud. It's noisy.

Jesus is sitting with him at the dinner table. You can assume the people there would have most likely just been work friends. Not many other people in the village would have liked to have been there with Levi because eating with him was a thing you didn't do. So there's tax collectors perhaps everywhere. His workmates, his supervisors. Lots of these guys.

And here we see Jesus in the midst of it all partying with tax collectors. It's like partying with accountants. Don't know how exciting that would be. But it was scandalous. Kobe is nodding his head.

It was scandalous. Meals played a huge role in the culture of the day. Meal times were far more than occasions for individuals to consume nourishment. Being welcomed, being invited to a dinner table was a big ceremony. It was a big deal.

There was a formal ceremony involved in dinners in that time. It was symbolic when you had dinner with someone that there was a friendship in existence. It was tight, it was intimate, it was a sign of unity. The term to break bread together carried deep meaning for people. In fact, Jews now will say to one another sometimes, "Come over and we'll break bread."

It was a tradition. It was a ceremony of unity. Meals signified a person's friendship and acceptance of someone else. If two people had become estranged or distanced, a meal was a sign of rebuilding burnt bridges, of restoring a friendship. It opened the way for reconciliation.

But we see in verse 29 that Luke describes Jesus' table companions, these people that He was reconciled to, as tax collectors and others. In verse 30, the Pharisees actually go out and say, "It's tax collectors and sinners." Luke says it's others. These guys say they are outright sinners. The message is clear.

These others don't measure up to the expectations of the Pharisees, of the religious people of that time. A central issue of religious people in the time of Jesus was with whom do I eat? With whom do I associate? Your religious status was dependent on the answer to that question. Your holiness, your future hope were bound up with this question.

Do I eat with unbelieving Gentiles who eat pork, who worship other gods? Can I eat with Jews who have wandered away from the faith, who are wilfully disobeying God's will? Should I go to a tax collector's house even if he claims to be a righteous man, to be a believer? Jesus doesn't give an answer to this question. In fact, He completely undermines the whole premise of this question.

He renders the question irrelevant. He goes to the house of tax collectors and He eats with them to show and to make a point. Now, let's have a little bit of sympathy for the Pharisees. Jesus eats with the enemies of God visibly. These guys weren't seen as believers at all.

They were dirty. They were cheating thieves who robbed God's people, who gave money to the oppressors, the Roman Empire, and they were a constant reminder of God's disapproval of the Jewish people because they weren't the nation that they used to be. But Jesus welcomes these enemies, these so-called enemies of God. Surely it makes any claims that Jesus might make about Himself to be from God to be nonsense. How can a holy man eat with these people, these enemies?

I mean surely you wouldn't welcome a heroin junkie into your house with your kids. Surely you wouldn't allow a male stripper to eat dinner with your wife. Can you see how their positions make good sense? It makes good sense. It's logical.

It makes sense unless God is doing something new. So new that it catches everyone off guard. It doesn't fit any of these old categories. God is doing something so gracious that it flabbergasts people. Look what is happening at this table in Luke five.

Before it, we see in verses 12 to 15, Jesus healing a man who has leprosy, a leper. Jesus reaches out and touches this leper. Instead of this leper coming to Jesus, Jesus becoming unclean, Jesus goes out to this leper. And instead of Jesus becoming unclean, this leper becomes clean. It's God's grace in action.

It's something new that's happening. God's grace goes out to the outcast and brings transformation. Later on, Jesus heals a paralysed man. But not only does He heal him, He forgives his sin. Jesus is not only a powerful prophet of God, but He has the same authority as God to forgive sin.

Grace is given to a disabled person. They are made new again, physically and spiritually. Jesus explains His mission like this in the passage we read. "It is not the healthy who are in need of a doctor, but the sick. I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

The Pharisees are asking Jesus to behave like a doctor who avoids sick people. A doctor who avoids sick people. Such a doctor clearly wouldn't be able to do his work. Jesus, the saviour, can't do His work with righteous people. He needs the people to be around Him to need Him.

His work is useless unless He's with sinful people. It's the same for those who follow Jesus. It's the same for us. We can't do our work of pointing sinners to the doctor unless we spend time with them. The meal table, which Jesus shared with tax collectors and sinners, was an outreach of grace.

The doctor had come to visit the sick. Jesus went right into the midst of the hearts of these people to give forgiveness. And we are left with an example of being able to do the same. Our homes can be those places of grace too. Our tables can be symbols of it doesn't matter who you are and where you've come from, you are loved.

You are accepted. The lessons which we see Jesus communicating to the Pharisees are fundamental principles of the gospel of grace and of evangelism. We see Jesus sitting here with a man who is so overwhelmed that he's been called by Jesus he throws a lavish banquet, invites all his mates to celebrate with him, to share Jesus with them. It shows us how we can penetrate into our society, into our neighbourhood, into our friendship circles with the saving grace of God. If we have compassion, if we have acceptance, we will not spend all our time and our energy condemning sinners.

We will be spending that time calling them to repentance with love. If you would obey our Lord by calling those around us to repentance, which is what Jesus left us with. He left us with the great commission to go into all the nations. If we would obey that command, then we must learn to have contact with unbelievers in such a way as to be comfortable with them, and for them to be comfortable with us. This is what our Lord did.

This is what our Lord calls us to do. But in this passage, Jesus also warns us about something. He says that sometimes we in the name of separation from sin could in fact very well be sinning ourselves by not having and not showing compassion to unbelievers and not by not giving contact and making contact with them in a way that we are able to share the gospel with them. That's an interesting accusation. We are sinning by not having contact, by removing ourselves from them.

Grace, we see in this passage, is radically subversive. This was an act of grace. A sinless man, Jesus, sitting with these guys. It is radically subversive. It is spectacularly counter intuitive.

Grace turns the world of people upside down. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you know how that feels. It turns you. See, everyone, every human thinks of life as some sort of ladder. That's our natural state. We move up and down this ladder.

How far you go up this ladder gives you a sense of identity, of pride. The more righteous you are, the higher up this ladder you move towards God. Your sense of well-being comes from how far up this ladder you are. How you can look down on those underneath you and feel better about yourself. You might say, "Well, I don't do that.

I'm not very self-righteous. I am a sinner. I know that." But even people who don't believe in God, who wouldn't imagine themselves trying to move towards God on this ladder, want to feel satisfied, want to feel fulfilled, want to feel accepted. And it might not be religious pride, but it could be success.

Moving up this ladder of success. Moving up this ladder with admiration from other people, a beautiful home, a secure future, nice clothes, nice women, a great body, a happy family life even. All of these are forms of self-salvation. They are forms of self-salvation, of feeling whole, of feeling fulfilled, of feeling you understand why you're here on earth. But self-salvation doesn't work.

It doesn't work. It doesn't work because none of these versions of salvation ever deliver. Self-salvation doesn't work because we cannot measure up. If you want to be admired by blokes, if you want to be blokey, but you're not blokey enough, your four wheel drive doesn't have big enough tyres on it, you do not have the best, most expensive watch on your arm, then you don't measure up. Even on a good day, you'll be worrying about what others think of you.

If you want security and prosperity and you lose your job, then you're condemned. Even if you have a job, you'll be anxious. You'll be overbusy. You'll be unable to say no because if you were to lose this, you would lose everything. That is self-salvation.

Now these efforts of self-salvation don't bring satisfaction. They don't bring identity. They don't bring joy because we were made to find that in God. To know Him, to glorify Him. Anything else, anything else is a cheap substitute.

It's not salvation. The good news is that Jesus Christ came not for the righteous, not for the ones who feel happy in their work, secure, who feel blokey. Jesus came for the sinners, for the sick. Jesus offers true salvation, which is being welcomed by God to His feast, to His banquet. The feast and the banquet in the gospels represent the kingdom of God.

We're going to be looking at that more in this series. Jesus welcomes us into this feast. And when we don't measure up, we're not condemned. Instead of condemning us, our king Jesus is condemned in our place. So salvation is not found through obeying any kind of law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

When Jesus eats with Levi, He makes the message clear. He says, "I've come for the losers. I've come for the losers, the people on the margins, the people who have made a mess of their lives, the people who don't fit in, the people who are pretty ordinary." Jesus has come for us, friends. Jesus has come for the cold coast.

Jesus has come for the schoolies in a month's time who will be so out of their brains they don't know where they belong. Jesus has come for those guys. In fact, the only people who are left out are the Pharisees. The ones who think they're all fine. They're the ones sitting right at the back looking through the window into this feast.

The only people left out are those who don't think they need God. The self-righteous. The self-important. In Levi's party, salvation comes to the margins of society. That's good news to the people at the margins today.

It's good news to everyone. But if we reject salvation at the margins, if we reject those whom God accepts, then we don't truly understand or embrace grace. We miss out on that celebration. In the picture of Jesus with the tax collectors, we see God in His kingdom. In Jesus, God is doing something so new, so gracious, it takes us by surprise.

It is, in fact, so gracious, it scandalises us. He chooses all of the wrong people. He invites everyone, not just His friends, not just the ones who have good table manners. Jesus invites everyone. He invites the best.

He invited the Pharisees. He invites the worst. He invites the highest and the lowest. He invites us. And now he leaves us with an example to follow.