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Comfort food. We all have a meal or two we go to when we need to be cheered up. The trauma the first disciples experienced after the Passover meal was almost unbearable. How could they move on? Thank God for the resurrection! The new day of the resurrection assures us death is not the end. A new day is coming where death will be no more and where, non surprisingly, Jesus will meet us a the table again with the ultimate comfort food anticipating the Kingdom to come.

A death sentenced criminal last meal is a grace given before the end. This was a meal meant to offer freedom and the joy of a new beginning. The host himself offered forgiveness and abundant life in God’s kingdom and yet, this meal became his last anticipating his imminent death. Paradoxically a gracious life-giving, liberating meal marked Jesus as someone who was born to die as a criminal but was innocent as a lamb. Jesus’s last supper is an invitation to trade places where he offers his life for our death and where we surrender our life for his glory. All are invited to take his place at the table as he takes ours at the cross.

You are invited but unfortunately you must decline for you are already committed elsewhere. In our overly busy world, God is calling us, inviting us to join him in the most audacious adventure, the most anticipated event of history, the utmost gathering of anyone who is somebody in the universe and giving us the freedom to bring as many as we wish and yet, we are too busy to come. The banquet will still take place but who makes it to it will be quite a surprise, are you available to come or will you be left out?

Do you have what it takes? We live in a world where our worth is constantly measured by our performance and ability to deliver. Even those who are overachievers, in this world, will fall short. In our moments of failure, disappointment, frustration, and longing for better, Jesus gives us hope. In Luke 9, Jesus will show us what God can do to turn a small ordinary lunch meal into an opportunity to experience the renewal of all things.

Barriers are sometimes meant to protect and sometimes meant to exclude and isolate. Barriers, by definition though, separate. How can we breach the gap of sin and alienation to have community with God and with each other? In this passage, Jesus invite those who are not his yet to experience his life-changing fellowship by removing the temporary protective walls of dietary law with his sin-forgiving, gracious hospitality able to turn sinners into saints.