The Joys of Hospitality (Tamara Katzenbach)

What do you do to fill your house with people? Usually one gives out invitations – by post, email or in person. I never thought about this before, but only complained that no one came to visit me. Then someone asked me: ‘have you actually invited someone to your home?’This is a very good question in many ways. After I have decided who I would like to come, and given the invitation, I begin behaving like Martha in the gospel. I worry about food, table decorations, tidiness in the living room and other fairly irrelevant details.

Putting myself in Matthew’s shoes, I wonder what his invitation was like. I don’t think there were all these things to think about in his time. For a proper meal in higher circles you reclined; that meant lying sideways on a narrow couch and taking your food from a low table in the middle. Sounds like utter luxury, doesn’t it? This is what Jesus came to when he dined with Matthew, apparently very soon after having called him as a disciple. What strikes me about the meal Jesus shared with Matthew and his friends is how unconcerned Matthew apparently was about the fact that Jesus did not at all belong to his kind of environment.

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