This past week was Thanksgiving, a time when many of us sat around a table with people that we don’t normally share meals with. Weird uncles, kooky aunts, intolerable Gen Z cousins, grandparents we have to repeat ourselves to over and over. In an era of extremely polarized discourse and communities; where our news, our algorithms, our neighborhoods, and our social circles are increasingly disparate, the Thanksgiving table can be where all those separate circles crash into one another, all around a turkey and stuffing. 

My group chats, social media stories, and feeds were filled with stories of people exasperated at their families – their habits, their cooking, their politics. How could they do that? Say that? Believe that? I’m going to say something. I know Grandma wants us to keep the peace but I can’t let them say something like that…

The turkey and stuffing can become a battle zone as quickly as it can become a place of family and gratitude. This week, as we reflect on dining with the people who we not only find annoying but whose beliefs or actions we may find abhorrent, I find myself thinking of Jesus and the meals he shared.  

As he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

Matthew 9:10-13 NRSVUE

The religious leaders of Jesus’s time took issue with Jesus’s choice of tablemates and spoke to Jesus’s disciples about it. We are primed as modern Christians to hear “Pharisee” and immediately assume “bad guy” or “someone trying to hurt Jesus.” But the question the Pharisees pose here actually makes a lot of sense. In Jesus’ time, a rabbi could establish his credibility and spread his message by dining with influential leaders and religious people, and dining with sinners seems like it would only hinder him being able to spread his message. The Pharisees ask the disciples what seems to be a very valid question – why would he do this? 

For those who haven’t been to a New Testament class in a minute – the “tax collectors and sinners” referenced here are not just pity cases, poor or sick people that the Jewish leaders understood as needing charity and care (although Jesus dined with them too), but those who were hated and exiled because of their actions and the way those actions hurt vulnerable Jewish people. 

I think it is relatively easy for us to imagine Jesus sitting down with the poor, the sick, the unhoused, the elderly, and welcoming them, but do we imagine Jesus sitting with those who we see as actively hurting the church? Can we imagine Jesus having dinner with those we see as traitors? Those who are taking God’s name in vain? Those profiting off the marginalized in our society? 

Can we imagine Jesus seeking out our kooky aunts and weird uncles, asking to have dinner with the part of your family you are most likely to consider splattering with mashed potatoes? Our convictions aren’t meaningless, we can have real, legitimate grievances with our families and loved ones, and none of those grievances compare to the grievances that the Pharisees had with the tax collectors. The Pharisees have a fair question. Is this really who Jesus wants to hang around with? Does he support them? Is he with them? Can’t he see what harm they have caused? 

In his response, Jesus reveals, yes, he knows the harm they have caused. And that isn’t the end of the story. It would be an act of hubris to imagine that we can take the place of Jesus in this passage, seeking out meals with those who see as traitors in order to be the doctor to the wounds in them that seem so apparent to us. That is the role of Jesus alone. But Jesus brings his disciples with him, Jesus calls them into continual, uncomfortable, face-to-face with every assumption they had ever made on who was in and who was out, beginning with their assumptions about themselves. 

We sit, most often, in the role of the pharisee, looking across our Thanksgiving tables and wondering why they were invited. Doesn’t our family understand the hurt they have caused? The things they believe? The things they said? Why are we dining with them? 

If we are lucky, we become the disciples. We are called into community with the other, with those who would raise the eyebrow of “The Good Christian,” the call of what we are to do in that community is intentionally ambiguous. If we aren’t to shame, to correct, but to love, to connect, to authentically show up as our selves, we have to be open to the reality that they may be changing us as much as we change them, that the outsider welcomed in Jesus’ name may actually have been us all along.  

I hope that your Thanksgiving was one of good food, good conversation, growth, and that you never once wanted to fling a spoon-full of macaroni and cheese across the table, but if you did, you just may have been at the right table.