In the gospel of Luke, meals are important. In fact, Jesus’ life in that gospel is punctuated with at least ten different meals. But they are more than just scenes in a play, a good way to bring people together and have them interact. Because all these meals, to Luke, are also an image of the future. Here’s something important to take away from this gospel. Luke believes not only that the eucharist is a meal, but that our whole life, eternal life with God, is like a meal. It is his vision of the future that awaits us. Whatever heaven is, what it’s most going to be like is…
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There’s a portrait of Jesus you’ve probably seen that a lot of people like. It shows Jesus laughing, and it’s true that over the centuries we have seen so many images of Jesus showing him as some otherworldly being, that it’s good sometimes to picture him as human, someone like us. Because he was. If that is your main picture of Jesus, though, today you have to make a change in the way you picture him. Because today in this gospel we see another side of Jesus, a Jesus we don’t often seek out, the Jesus who turns our lives completely upside down. I don’t know if we can avoid…
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Tonight, I’m having people over for dinner, and I’m looking forward to it. In complete disregard for the last few sentences of this gospel, where the host of the dinner is advised not to invite his friends, in fact, I’m having dinner with very good friends. I couldn’t live without dinner with other people, people I love. That, really, is one of the points in this gospel reading— that none of us can live without meals, meals with others, meals where we are taken care of. They are the whole goal of life, really, they are why we are here around this table [tonight/today], for a meal like that. In…