My father was sharing with me about a church service he attended earlier this week. It was a worship gathering done in the style of what is known as a “dinner church,” which typically contains three movements: communion, a meal together, and some type of Bible study. The particular church he was attending is in a lower income community with a higher homeless population and those folks are part of this particular gathering, so often it can be a rougher group of folks. On the evening my dad was visiting, one of the men that dad was eating with suddenly took issue with another man who was at the table with them. There was then a yelling match with lots of threats of violence and everyone had to patiently and calmly make sure that the two men wouldn’t come to blows before continuing on with the remainder of the meal and moving onto their Bible study and communion together. Rather than being dismayed by these events, my father was laughing uproariously at the situation saying with great joy, “It was a wonderful worship! It was worshiping with exactly the type people Jesus actually hung around with!”
Sometimes we like to imagine the crowds that surrounded Jesus as being reverent and awed by his mere presence and the message of the good news, and I’m sure there were moments like that, but I have to wonder if a lot of the time, it was just pure chaos. The crowds must have been filled with people with all kinds of issues, concerns, or axes to grind with other people present. It’s hard for me to believe that there wouldn’t have been hecklers and those in disagreement with Jesus shouting and causing all kinds of ruckus. And yet that type of setting was exactly where Jesus ministered, healed, taught, and broke bread with others. If he had only waited for peaceful and serene moments where people were on their best behavior to share the Good News, he wouldn’t have been able to share much of it, would he?