“When you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.” (Luke 14.13)
Texas and BBQ go together like Cheech and Chong or Simon and Garfunkel. You’ll always find BBQ in Texas. One of my favorite BBQ places is a renovated Dairy Queen in the next town over–DQs also so ubiquitous they are known as the Texas Stop Sign. They’ve done a nice job on the renovation and they do an even nicer job on their BBQ.
Theirs is a friendly attitude. Laid-back and easy-going. The servers have a genuine smile on their faces and–if you want more onions and pickles–they’re happy to get some more for you. The BBQ is served on your old-fashioned serving tray like you’d get in a school cafeteria or at Furr’s Cafeteria. There is a thin piece of light-brown paper about 10″ x 10″ on top of the tray. That’s where your BBQ goes. No plates. Like I said, laid-back.
The first time I walked into the place I stood and waited for a server to show me to my seat. I looked around for a hostess stand, but there wasn’t one. Soon enough, a waiter came from the kitchen and said to me in a friendly voice, “Sit wherever you like.” So I went to the nearest booth and within just minutes I had some delicious BBQ.
Yeshua bar Yossef–the Galilean Teacher–had the same friendly attitude. “Sit wherever you like.” Unfortunately, his laid-back attitude did not go over so well with the people of Palestine. Maybe their mamas didn’t teach them good manners like Texas mamas do. Often he got frowned upon for his all-are-welcome attitude. Sometimes he got run out of town by the sheriff. More often than not, he wasn’t invited back. You can be sure he didn’t get the key to the city.
Mediterranean table etiquette was set in stone and had been since the creation of the world. Read Plato’s Dialogues and you’ll see how prissy they were about their dining habits. The Romans stole the style and amped it up. Soon enough, everybody in the Empire knew the right way to eat. And the cardinal rule was that the host was seated front and center with the most important guests to the right and to the left of him. Then the other guests were seated on the right (more important) and left (less important) sides of the room in descending order of importance. So, as soon as you entered the room, you knew who was in and who was out, who was somebody and who was nobody.
And you just thought the high school cafeteria was laid out in grids, with the jock crowd and the geek squad at opposite sides of the room, with the conclave of cheerleaders as far away as possible from the clique of crazy ravers. Then wait till you see how these bygone banquets were designed to show who was important and who was low man on the totem pole. Where do you think the idea of assigned school cafeteria tables came from? Right.
But the Teacher from Galilee thought seating charts were ridiculous. He suggested reversing the order, with the last being first and the first being last. “Don’t go for the places of honor at table,” he said, “Take the lowest places.” You can be sure there were gasps and smelling salts. This breach of etiquette was as bad as asking a Yankee to eat fried chicken with her fingers. Why in the world, they said, would the Teacher show such bad manners?
As always, the Rabbi was teaching an important lesson or two. He found seating charts–like fancy clothes and country estates and high culture ways–were used to discriminate and to divide. He disdained the nasty habit that he saw in society where people were categorized and labeled, like cans on a supermarket shelf. He thought it was better to roll the cans off the shelf, remove the labels, and mix them up. He said the Father of all didn’t like his children called names.
It reminds me of a story I read somewhere. The man said he and his wife had received several boxes of canned goods that had been given to them because the factory had mislabeled all the cans in the batch. Somebody on the factory line wasn’t paying attention and allowed the cans to be labeled the same way. So, all the cans carried a green bean label, although there was just as good a chance that it was kernel corn or new potatoes or kidney beans. He said he and his wife got a blast out of not knowing what they were going to be eating until they opened the can.
Unfortunately, the people in charge of the seating chart didn’t find the same humor in the Rabbi’s ideas. Word had got around town that he felt just as comfortable eating with prostitutes as he did with politicians, and he found dinner conversation with tax collectors as much fun as talk with the town mayor. The Rabbi didn’t seem to appreciate distinctions or differences. “And what would the world become,” asked the angry city council, “if everybody was treated the same?”
Hullabaloo filled the hall and soon enough the Rabbi was a persona non grata, right with his friends the fishermen and his admirers from across the tracks. Nobody was ready to do what he suggested–“when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.” That kind of mixer may work at a weekend church camp, but it isn’t going to work as a way of life. No way.
So, two thousand years have passed and the Teacher’s words still stand as a shout out for a way of life that seems as crazy now as it did then. When was the last time we invited the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind to join us at the buffet at Golden Corral? Granted, there is an occasional effort to live as the Rabbi urged us to live, but we’ve never made it to the finish line. Read the newspapers. Look down the street. Let’s search our souls to see if we make an “A.”
A few years ago I watched with a combination of curiosity and bewilderment as a bride-to-be worked on the seating chart for her wedding reception. She had pieces of paper cut out with each person’s name printed on it and she moved those pieces of paper across the diagram as if it was a jigsaw puzzle, trying this piece here and then moving it there. This task lasted for weeks. I don’t know if she ever got the chart to come together as the perfect plan she envisioned.
As I watched her at work, I wanted to ask, “What if you just threw away the seating chart and told everybody to sit where they wanted? What’s the worst thing that could happen?” I didn’t ask the question because she already was stressed to the max. But I still think the question is a good one. What is the worst thing that could happen if we just said, “Sit where you want?” My guess is we might find, as the Rabbi did, that the person we thought wasn’t like us ended up being like us in more ways than we imagined possible. Imagine that.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 