By Gary Topping–
In the current issue of America magazine, Fr. Sam Sawyer, S.J. poses the question, “Would Jesus eat with Sarah Sanders”? He is referring, of course, to a recent incident in Lexington, Virginia, where the owner of the Red Hen restaurant asked President Trump’s press secretary to leave. The woman did so in a very civil, non-confrontational way, calling Sanders aside and quietly asking her to leave, which Sanders did with no protest (other administration officials have been similarly confronted in public places with much less civility).
While Fr. Sawyer applauds the restaurant owner’s civility, he adds a warning that “if civility is used to call for passivity in the face of injustice, then it becomes part of the problem. But if civility serves as a kind of guardrail, pushing us to look for better methods of protest and witness, it may be very valuable.” So he suggests that the restaurant owner might more productively have asked Sanders if she could join her at the table, where she could air her dissatisfactions with administration policies as Jesus did when sharing meals with sinners rather than just standing off and denouncing their transgressions publicly, thus effecting their moral transformation by inclusion rather than exclusion.
Fr. Sawyer refers to no specific instances in the Gospels, though there are several he might have cited. The one that immediately jumped out in my mind was Jesus’ encounter with the diminutive Jericho tax collector Zacchaeus, as narrated in Luke 19. Tax collectors in first century Palestine were notoriously corrupt agents of a hated regime. The idea that Jesus would call Zacchaeus out of the tree to spend the day at his house really raised eyebrows, none less than those of Zacchaeus himself, who immediately repented, giving half his goods to the poor and restoring fourfold anything he had dishonestly acquired. “This day salvation has come to this house,” Jesus asserted, “…for the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost.”
My wife and I have noticed that social relations in our neighborhood have become much less frequent and cordial since the 2016 election. We still wave when we see each other, but we rarely linger for a conversation out the car window or over the proverbial backyard fence. If America is becoming great again, it is becoming much less happy around our place. We are planning a backyard cocktail party for the neighborhood to say good-bye to an empty-nester couple across the street who are selling out and moving into a distant condominium. Perhaps Jesus can bring salvation to us as he did to Zacchaeus.
