What were your family meals like growing up? Has that changed? I remember quiet Sunday afternoons with grandparents, chicken and gravy and wonderful stories. Or sitting at dinner during the week with the entire family, reviewing our days, eating everything on the plate, and planning from each tomorrow.
Such memories cause me to wish I could still sit with my grandparents, parents, or grown children today. Yet, because we shared so many meals, I still feel their presence and the love they shared. I imagine it is the same for you as well!
I miss meals with my children when they were young and we sat down together to review the day, prepare for the next and share the same food. It was a mess at times, not enough food or maybe someone wouldn’t eat because they got kicked under the table. Food was the reason we gathered, but it was the conversations, the conflicts, and the laughter that were the side benefits and memories of those times together. Now that our children are all surviving their own family meals at their homes, Roxanne and I often eat out, or long to find others with whom to feel again like a family as we eat. I miss family meals.
What a change we face today! And how different family meals have become for us and for our children. We rush! We eat alone! We rush! We eat quickly! And are on the road again! Meals come at different times and fast foods have replaced home cooked meals with family. In high school, our kids were going in every direction at once, for sports or part time jobs, and we slowly got out of the family meal routine. Even now, Rox and I have so many evenings apart we eat separately more often than together.
The Emmaus story reminds what is lost when we lose family meals. On the night of Easter, disciples were so absorbed with the incredible loss of Good Friday they were blind to anything else. Some heard that Jesus had been seen alive, but that seemed to others an idle tale. They cried. They scattered. They ran. They had spent so many meals with Jesus and suddenly it wasn’t the same.
Two who headed home to escape the pain were joined, by of all people, Jesus. They had heard he was risen but couldn’t comprehend how that could be true, and they were getting as far away from Jerusalem as they could. Their meals would never be the same again, or so they thought.
And so, headed to a village called Emmaus, Jesus suddenly appeared, but their eyes were still clouded by tears and their minds closed by fear that they couldn’t see who was walking with them. Mary, that same morning had a similar experience as she mistook the risen Jesus for the cemetery gardener of the cemetery. We can’t understand why they couldn’t see what was right before them, but which of us would expect a dead loved one to rejoin us just as before?
Anyway, these two followers of Jesus had their eyes closed to seeing who He was! But that was just the beginning. More interesting is how their eyes were opened. Easter finally dawned as they invited a stranger to join them for a meal. They had learned their lessons well and were already primed to follow in Jesus steps. This stranger on the road was obviously heading farther down the road but they insisted he join them in the hospitality of the family meal. Just as Jesus paused on his way to the cross to wash his disciples’ feet, these two men paused from their grief and invited Jesus into their home for a meal.
When Jesus broke the bread and said a prayer of blessing, they recognized him! Were it not for that meal, the joy of Easter would have been delayed, and an opportunity easily missed. It happened only because the meal was so important; they invited this stranger to join them.
How different we are! It isn’t just fast food, but the tendency to email or text rather than talk face to face. We leave sticky notes on the fridge and rush to the car, and even when together stare at our screens rather than each other. We become so detached we miss simple joys and clues which loved ones seek to share.
When we don’t spend such time with loved ones, how can we remember we are loved? How many opportunities are lost when we could have said, “I am sorry” or “what is it you need from me?” There is a cost for everything we embrace, and the cost of fast food is more than poor nourishment but the loss of family togetherness, brotherly love, and intimate conversations of substance.
When tear-filled disciples invited a stranger to their family meal, the breaking of bread caused Easter to dawn in their hearts and their eyes to open! Our eyes always glaze over when we read all the rules and regulations of Leviticus, but do you now understand why so many of those rules dealt with family meals? This is the time and place to gather our family as one!
The family meal was a sacred time of worship. A time to escape the brokenness of daily life and be one with God and with each other. How wonderful for God’s love in a meal to be the key to a fulfilling nourishment of body and spirit! Schedules, vacations, illness, distractions, and many other reasons have changed the routine of a weekly family meal. Even our time of worship notices such changes as we seldom have all our entire faith family together for the most important meal of our lives.
How often, like Jesus, are we walking next to people who for one reason or another are so rushed or distracted that they can’t see the miracle of Easter in their own lives? Whether our children or parents or a co-worker or a stranger, when we take time to break and bless bread eyes will be opened. For those who have no family at home, it is the family here that becomes even more important!
“Fast food” certainly weakens nourishment and misses community, but more than anything misses the ONE who prepares the meal!!! Remember how the lives of grieving disciples were changed simply because they took the time to sit down in the quiet, reflective, renewing time of a meal?
As with so many important issues in our lives, it all begins at a meal. As Easter people we are called to sit down to dinner more often (whether here or at home) with family, friends, strangers, in fellowship, worship, prayer, and the actions of servant love. All of that is part of the God’s holy meal in which the broken bread reminds us how Jesus’ life was broken to be shared with us.
It is in the family meal that eyes are opened, and hearts are warmed by the true love of Easter and risen Jesus! Fast food is convenient when we are in a rush, but too much of it weakens nourishment and community. And it misses eating with the cook!
What would Emmaus dinner have been like without Jesus? What were the rest of those lives like because they took time to invite Jesus to their table? It is in a familiar setting of the family meal that eyes are opened, so that in unfamiliar places we remember “we’ve been there, done that” and our eyes stay open.
So, what will it be for you – fast food or a family meal? And what about that habit of praying or asking for a blessing over the food? Is that not taking time to turn away from what is bothering or distracting us and invited Jesus to join us (or maybe to remember that he is already standing next to us and we need a moment to open our eyes?
Come Lord Jesus, be our guest … Indeed. It is another wonderful way to see Jesus!