Enjoy your meal
Dear People of St. Boniface,
I am sure you are capable of meeting the needs of vegetarians and vegans, and if you were asking Jewish or Moslem guests for a meal you wouldn’t go offering them pork, so you are quite used to questions of diet.
This became a problem during my time in Corinth, where I had stressed that Christ had made us free, and also had blessed all foods, thus making the old Jewish dietary laws obsolete. The trouble was that some Jewish new believers couldn’t go that fast.
So when Christians came together for the Eucharist, and the communal meal which preceded it, some – apart from showing the others up by bringing lavish food – came with non-kosher food and scandalised the rest.
Another matter concerned meat from the market, some of which had been offered to pagan idols and then passed on for sale, at a cheaper price, which made it attractive except … was it ‘polluted’ by paganism? My answer was that since the idols were nothing at all, the food could be eaten without scruples. Again, some were uneasy about this.
What is more, some of the “strong”, as I called them, taunted the “weak” by inviting them for a meal and then saying when their mouth was full: “this meat has been offered to idols, you know, but that doesn’t matter now, does it?”
This for me was unacceptable behaviour, pushing others along and drawing attention to one’s own ‘sophistication’. In fact I was so sensitive to this that I resolved to give up eating meat entirely so I wouldn’t happen to cause grief to a “weak” convert.
I am sure you can think of parallels in your time – making fun of ‘simple’ people’s faith and so causing them embarrassment. Enjoy your next meal!
My blessing, from Heaven, PAUL.