By Harry T. Cook

Matthew 9: 9-13

Servant-hood can be very ennobling. Just stand behind the counter in a soup kitchen benevolently handing out bowls of soup to the indigent, silently saying to yourself, “Self: there but for good fortune go I.” I’ve done that many times over at a soup kitchen our church supports. It was many years before I could work up what it took to take my own bowl of soup out from the social safety behind the counter and into the dining area to eat with the homeless. Once I did it, though, it changed the whole dynamic. I was at table with other human beings, sharing the same fare, talking with them, listening to them. There was at least a semblance of equality. And there was that favorite of all Christian things: fellowship.

It was during the 1996 election campaign that I found myself one day at the soup kitchen in learned conversation with one homeless man, a war veteran with only one leg. He said with a wry grin that he had left his other one in Vietnam. He was angry about the mileage a permanently injured World War II veteran was getting that year as a presidential candidate about whose politics he was thoroughly informed and of which he was scornful. Political junkie that I am, I engaged him until I was reminded by a fellow parishioner that I had neglected my post in the kitchen overlong. I came away from that conversation feeling that I had connected with a very smart but very unlucky human being who was, for all his trappings of abject poverty, exactly what America at its best was all about. Yet I got to leave him and his fellow homeless persons behind as by 3 o’clock that afternoon I was on my way in my fine car to my fine home in a pleasant suburb whose homeless are largely invisible and considered undesirable. I realize that my commitment to serve the poor and homeless stops at the shelter at which my fellow parishioners and I work and at that soup kitchen where I finally began to sit and eat with the clients, as they are known. But I do not invite them to my table at home, though it would give me secret and evil pleasure to see my neighbors’ faces as they came to our front door. With whom we eat – and not just on Soup Kitchen Day – is what makes the difference. And I do not know how we get to the point that we bypass the soup kitchen and the shelter and go directly to our tables and guest rooms at home. I openly confess that it sounds like such a great idea in theory, but when I think of it in practical terms, I don’t know how I would handle it. So I read and re-read today’s gospel about Jesus eating, sitting at dinner in the house with those considered by most of his contemporaries to be undesirable and in this text enumerated as tax collectors and sinners, and I think that if someone actually did that he must have been way better a human being than I. Maybe that’s why some people thought Jesus was God. Under the circumstances, you could hardly blame them.

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