(Please read this Scripture passage first, before the homily.)
When you open your Bible to the New Testament, you will find the four Gospels first and later on the letters of St Paul. The writing of Paul, however, predated the writing of the gospel. The gospels present us the life of Jesus as he experienced it in his own mortal life and as his followers experienced it in their lives. The identity of the historical Jesus is intertwined with the presence of Jesus in his Church.
One of the problems faced by the early followers of Christ concerned table fellowship, how they celebrated meals together (or apart). This problem may be reflected in the advice Jesus gave in the Gospel about “eating what is set before you.” The visitor should adjust to the customs of the residents. As one of our modern sayings puts it, “When in Rome do as the Romans do”.
The Church had by this time decided that believers in Christ did not need to be circumcised. It still had to resolve the issue of whether a Jewish believer could eat with a Gentile believer. In theory, the Church had also decided that Jewish and Gentile believers could eat together. So, Peter, also called Cephas, ate with the Gentile converts at Antioch when he first came to visit them. But when his friends from Jerusalem came, Peter stopped eating with the Gentile converts and ate only with the Jewish converts. In theory, but not in practice, the issue had been resolved.
At this point, Paul intervened and called out Peter for his conduct. Paul wanted Peter to accept the decision made earlier and stop his pretense. Paul’s case was that the Jewish-Christian Peter, who had been acting like a Gentile, had no right to compel Gentile believers to become Jewish first.
We still wrestle with table fellowship today. It may not be a question of circumcised and uncircumcised eating together, but it may be whether supporters of Donald Trump could eat together with supporters of Joe Biden. It may be a question why political candidates cannot behave courteously with one another. It may be a question whether family members can forgive other family members for wrongs seemingly done. It may be that we have problems forgiving ourselves or living with ourselves.
The answer may lie in “eating what is set before us” by seeing everything that unites us rather than the few things that divide us. The answer may lie in seeing the grace of God working both in our lives and in the lives of opponents.