In progressive Protestant churches today, there’s a strong consensus that Communion is the sacrament of inclusion. Everyone should have a seat at the Table. The open Table enacts not only a hospitable world, we say, but also a just and inclusive one. 

“Open Communion” is a novel practice. It wasn’t long ago that everyone “fenced” the Table. There were all kinds of fences–denominational belonging, theological beliefs, moral strictures, age and intellectual requirements. In many cases, you had to be confirmed first. And in all cases, you needed to be baptized. In the global church today, mostly you still do. 

A fully inclusive Table is a complete break with this Tradition. The universal church has never witnessed, much less countenanced, the kind of no-questions-asked-openness that now characterizes the progressive wings of the church.

In that wing, an open Table has acquired quasi-dogmatic status. Just scroll through social media after a Catholic bishop denies Communion to a public figure, or someone posts about being at a funeral Mass or wedding where the priest announced who was and wasn’t welcome to receive. There’s immediate blowback from our side: indignation, condemnation, and a lot of people crowing “I’m so glad I’m in X progressive denomination, and not like those others.” (Oh dear, isn’t there a parable about that?) 

But mostly you hear painful personal stories brimming with bewilderment, sadness, and anger. Unfencing the Table is a response to a sacramental practice that separates, excludes, subordinates, and punishes. And we believe it’s proving itself by its fruits. We all know someone who’s been healed by a gracious invitation at one of our Tables. 

But we need to acknowledge something else about us progressives:  When we’re convinced we’re doing something just, especially if we’re the out there on the edge, the first to do it, we tend to be headlong about it, rarely pausing for thought. Our self-assurance makes us impatient with and sometimes dismissive of questions and nuance, thus missing chances to go deeper. 

Our tendency is to proceed on sentiment and a few proof-texts. We assume innovation is always a gain for the Tradition. We ignore the possibility that it could also potentially entail a loss. Or better said, we act as if the goodness of the new thing we’re doing is simple and self-evident. 

It never is. Which doesn’t mean it’s wrong, only that it’s not always immediately apparent that the Spirit is authentically at work. And you’d think that in the case of this totally new thing called the Open Table, we’d at least attempt to ground our practice in scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, as Christians have always done at important junctures of doctrinal development. But discernment in the church’s progressive wing usually relies mainly on experience, especially pastoral need; and it’s often the only thing that carries any legitimizing weight for us. 

I’m a strong proponent of an open Table, yet I find it disconcerting that we progressives have not really attempted a thorough-going theological, ecclesial, scriptural, rational and, yes, of course, experiential case for it beyond the assertion that Jesus did it, so we can, and should, do it, too. 

Now, don’t misunderstand. When all else is said and done, I think experience and pastoral need are vital and persuasive reasons for doing what we do. It’s that ” all else said and done” that concerns me. Pastoral need may indeed be paramount, but to say so with reliable Christian confidence, we probably need to have pondered other concerns, too, discerning and sifting among all the available relevant evidence until we land on what we believe to be the Spirit’s bottom line. When you’re altering a 2,000 year universally held norm, the burden of proof falls on you. You may be right (and I think we are), but you need to show your work. 

So, let’s take a closer look at the Table we say Christ hosts and to which he welcomes all without exception. And let’s begin with the stories that the gospels tell about the company he kept at meals. 

It’s undeniable that Jesus had an indiscriminate meal practice that some critics disapproved of. And this is one way we argue for full Eucharistic inclusion: He ate with tax collectors and sinners. No one was ‘other’ to Jesus. He welcomed everyone and turned no one away. Neither should we. 

But the reality is more nuanced. In all the gospel stories of Jesus’ eating and drinking, he eats and drinks only with fellow Jews, never Gentiles or Samaritans, with the arguable exception of the feeding of the 4,000 in the Decapolis, in Gentile territory, where we may surmise the presence of some Gentiles in the crowd. 

But, as Andrew McGowan and others have pointed out, Jesus’ ordinary custom was to eat with his own: Jews of different classes and conditions, to be sure, including all kinds of socially disreputable folks, but always within the family. Jesus was inclusive, but only somewhat. There’s no indication that a fully inclusive meal practice was ever his thing. 

We also regard his willingness to eat indiscriminately as uniquely law-breaking and controversial. But eating with mixed and dubious Jewish company was not unique. We find the pious and the lax mingling at banquets he attended, and a sinful woman shows up in Simon the Pharisee’s house to weep on Jesus’ feet.

It wasn’t particularly controversial, either, except for some groups with very specific ritual concerns, like the Pharisees. (They wanted to expand the purity appropriate to Temple priests to all Jews, and thus to sanctify the whole of Jewish life. It’s not for nothing that when Jesus defends his eating practices, it’s nearly always in conversation with them. No one else seems to mind all that much. 

So, what can we say based on scripture? 

Jesus was somewhat inclusive, but not fully. His indiscriminate meal practice raised eyebrows among some special groups but was not otherwise unique or controversial. 

OK. But what about his table, the one he never turned anyone away from and at which he was host? 

There are only three instances in scripture when Jesus could reasonably be said to host a meal—the improvised, indiscriminate feedings of multitudes out in the open; the for-members-only Last Supper at a borrowed table in someone else’s hall; and the post-resurrection cookout on the beach for a handful of his closest friends. 

Apart from these instances, Jesus is never the host at his table. He doesn’t have a table. He always eats at somebody else’s. Tax collectors have him to dinner. A prominent Pharisee invites him. Peter’s mother feeds him. Martha frets a meal for him in Bethany. And so on.

Jesus doesn’t invite, he gets invited. When he eats with tax collectors and sinners, he’s not the host, he’s a guest. He doesn’t offer his hospitality to them, he accepts theirs. So, when we say we welcome everyone to our Table because Jesus welcomed everyone to his, it appears that we’re on thin evidentiary ground. 

I’m not arguing for exclusions at our Tables based on the gospels’ depiction of Jesus at other people’s tables. I’m proposing a shift in perspective. Although the scriptural evidence may not support claims about Jesus’ fully inclusive meal practice and, it presents us with challenges for our justice-doing at the Table nonetheless. 

I think that Jesus as an all-inclusive host is actually less ethically challenging for us than Jesus as a willing, modest, receptive guest. Here’s why:

In Jesus’ world, extending hospitality was a way to create and express networks of friendship and patronage. Hospitality and hosting entailed a kind of reciprocity that allowed you to call people who eat together “friends,” or even equals. But it was often a fictive convention, because extending hospitality was and still is also a way to establish power.

Banquets and symposia in Jesus’ time routinely included signs of hierarchy and dependence, such as higher and lower places at the table, or better food and drink depending on your status. (Which is what Jesus was talking about when he told his disciples to take the lower places at banquets, and what Paul was referring to when he scolded the Corinthians for hogging the best food at the Lord’s Supper.) What appears to be an act of magnanimous generosity– hosting–was thus also a display of affluence and taste, an assertion of customs and norms, and a subtle statement of control. If Jesus was a host, it means he controlled the feast. I’m not sure we want that model at our Tables. 

But he wasn’t a host, and he controlled nothing. The gospels show us a hungry Jesus, not a hospitable one. “Zaccheus, come down, I’m eating at your house today.” Jesus the moocher. Jesus dependent on other people’s hospitality, the hospitality of the despised and marginalized as well as the influential and the rich. 

Maybe this invited Jesus calls us not so much to be good hosts, but to relinquish as he did the often-unconscious assumption that we’re the ones throwing the party and doing the inviting. Like Jesus, we’re not the givers of the feast; with him, we’re guests among guests at God’s feast. We may have arrived earlier than others, but that doesn’t give us proprietary rights over the hall. And if even unconsciously we think and act as if it does, we haven’t yet pondered deeply enough the Mercy by which we all got in here in the first place. 

In a Christian Century column, Sam Wells proposes that the term,’ hospitality’ is inadequate to the radicality of Jesus’ practice. He suggests the term ‘guestability’ instead — the grace and receptivity to act generously in other people’s territory, setting aside the privileges of being the host, and being willing and available to accommodate and adapt, to learn and appreciate. 

“When you stay in someone else’s house,” he says, “you might bring a gift, ask what’s a suitable time to get up, take an interest in your host’s furniture, express gratitude for their cooking, and try to penetrate the mysteries of their dishwasher or recycling system.”

Guestability doesn’t undermine the need for wide welcome and acceptance, affirmation, and welcome at the Table. It questions only the often unconscious but nonetheless real sense of ownership with which we tend to extend it, no matter how much we insist it’s not our Table. 

Guestability tempers the impulse to play the protagonist, it undermines all forms of entitlement, conscious or unconscious, overt or subtle, and it requires us to make the Eucharistic liturgy a new kind of social space, free of all signifiers of rank, precedence, and ownership.

Wells also believes that the word “inclusion,” is inadequate, and subtly controlling. It’s hard for ‘inclusion’ to shed its note of noblesse oblige, the sense that I, being generous and just, let you come to me and become one of us who own the space and patrol the sacred perimeters. He suggests the phrase, ‘common discovery’ instead—”something we more readily appreciate when we’re outside our own familiar territory.” 

It’s not, ‘You can belong here because I’m being good to you.’ “It’s, ‘Being with you is showing me there’s something beyond us both, toward which we’re both heading, and to which you may be closer than I am. Let’s make our way there together.'” 

I don’t know about ‘common discovery’ as a term to replace inclusion, but the displacement of privilege Wells is getting at seems just right, and challenging in ways that including is not. It’s a dynamic similar to de-centering whiteness, de-colonizing theology, and the like. 

Back in the 1980’s some concerned Andover Newton faculty members decided to get off the seminary’s lofty hill and down into what was then called, forebodingly, “the inner city.” They established a ministry center in Roxbury which, as most of you know, is a predominantly Black neighborhood of Boston with a lot of really bad racist press. 

One evening the ANTS profs convened a session with area activists about what they could do to help address the neighborhood’s issues. One woman from the community listened patiently and politely as they nattered on about  the ideas they had that might make life better there. But soon she’d had enough. 

She stood up and began describing the richness of the community, the people who live there, their beauty and accomplishments, their creative institutions, their courageous families, their struggle to make the neighborhood more than a frontpage horror story. And she demanded to know why smart theology guys like them seemed able to conceive of Roxbury only as a problem to be solved, not a gift to be received. 

If we take seriously that Communion enacts a new social reality into which we’re all incorporated by the Spirit; if we take seriously that the Christ-Body we’re incorporated into is hungry for what’s on offer at other people’s tables; if we take seriously that to be a guest is potentially more saving, healing, and just than being a host, more intriguing, fruitful, and amazing, too, it could make a difference not only in our faith posture at the Table; it could also reposition our lives and ministries in the world. 

We might more readily accept invitations, find comfort and strength at other people’s tables, respect their manners, sample their food, relish their fellowship, cherish their gifts and graces, learn from their wisdom and strength, make discoveries and go places together we never dreamed existed. And when we do stand near the Table and invite the world to come, we’d do so far more humbly, dispossessed and emptied of privilege and control, in amazement, in thanksgiving, and on our knees.

So, does all this mean we should can never say that Jesus welcomed all, and mean all? Never speak of Christ as our welcoming host? Not make it clear that everyone is welcome? Is there any scriptural or theological basis for our current inclusive practices?

At the risk of seeming to take back everything I just said, I think we can say that Jesus welcomed all without exception and that he is our all-embracing host at the Table, even when the scriptural evidence doesn’t fully support this characterization. 

Why can we say so? Because the church is always engaged in discerning its experience of Jesus, and this discernment, if we’re doing it “right,” looks not only backward to the Jesus of the gospels but also forward to the risen One seated at the right hand of God. 

Looking back, we can say only so much, go so far. Looking back, inclusion is only partial, and Jesus is more guest than host. But when we look forward, we find additional, important, and illuminating grounds for affirming Jesus as all-inclusive host at a Table of eternal welcome.

Simply put, the church knows that the story didn’t end with the resurrection and ascension. Jesus “sits (eternally) at the right hand of God,” and he comes to us now from that fulness. We can imitate his future as well as his past. And in that glorious, fulfilled, future perspective, we see him as host, inclusive welcomer, and provider. And it wasn’t very long after the gospels were written that the church began characterizing him that way in prayer, song, visual art, and teaching. 

The church ruminated on gospel parables of the eschatological banquet and the post-resurrection stories of Emmaus and the breakfast on the shore. It also reflected on its own post-resurrection experience of Christ. 

The church listened to itself, plumbing the religious experience of the faithful, many of whom were themselves marginal, and all of whom understood themselves to have been rounded up from the highways and byways, like the surprised people ushered into the king’s banquet in Jesus’ parable. 

In the experience of having been far off and then brought near, grafted on, in Pauls’ memorable phrase, Gentile convert s especially experienced Christ’s acceptance of them as a host’s inclusive welcome. Thus, the church’s imagination embraced Jesus as welcoming host at the inclusive banquet of mercy and love. 

The “fact” of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension is an additional, and I think crucial, basis for claiming him as all-inclusive host. Eschatology matters. If it is true as a matter of faith that a living Christ sits now and forever at the right hand of God, it means (to repeat) that Christ comes to us now not from the past but also from the future. So, when we say that he’s the all-inclusive host, we’re taking as our pattern not only his meal practice back then, but also and even more crucially his consummated fullness now. We imitate the future Christ, not the past.

When we say the Table is open, it’s not so much because Jeus’s table was completely open on earth (it wasn’t); it’s because we believe it is meant to be open in God’s fullness of time, and that in the consummation of all things it will be or, better said, it is: in God’s eternal future, people are even now streaming from east and west, north and south to the banquet set on the Lord’s high holy mountain. The future fullness is inbreaking now: and it that fulness we enact at the Table. 

The Table is the place of anamnesis, of remembering that is participatory, immediate, and liberating. But in a sense, this remembering also looks towards the future. We don’t ask only, “What would that Jesus back then do if he were here (today)?” We ask also, “What is the living Jesus doing now?” And that’s what we remember, that’s what we do.

Now to be honest, as vindicating as this eschatological perspective may be, we’re not completely out of the exclusionary woods. According to the parables of the eschatological banquet, anyway, that future feast inbreaking now still excludes to some degree: the people who didn’t come when invited are barred from entering the hall, and even the new invitees can be booted out if they’re not dressed properly. 

I’m not sure how to make sense of that, but for now, I’m simply going to side with St John Chrysostom and other teachers in the early church who, knowing the same scriptures we know, taught various forms of universalism anyway, and suffered to defend them. 

So, do we have grounds to declare the table radically open? Do we have grounds to regard Jesus as host of all kinds of people, and even to assume an inviter’s role ourselves in imitatio Christi? We do, they’re just not the usual grounds we cite. To make those grounds plainer, we may need to make more of the Communion liturgy’s eschatological dimensions (“until he comes”) than most of us do now.