Starting today, Bishop Earl Boyea of Lansing invites you to join him for a new series of reflections on seven meals in people’s homes where Jesus Christ is present. Each encounter is recorded in the Gospel of Saint Luke.
What’s the significance of these meals? Well, they foreshadow the heavenly banquet, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9), to which each of us is personally invited by Christ. And, thus, they help inform our response to that divine invitation as we each work out our own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).
In this first reflection, Bishop Boyea meditates upon Christ’s meal at the home of Saint Matthew, recently converted and full of zeal, who has invited many of his former tax-collecting colleagues to join them, much to the disapproval of the scribes and Pharisees (Luke 5:29–32). In response, Christ explains: “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”