Book Review: A Meal With Jesus

At first glance Tim Chester's new book A Meal With Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community, and Mission around the Table doesn't look like much. The cover is clever, with the plaid pattern reminiscent of the old Betty Crocker cookbook but the book itself is a pretty light 144 pages. The content though? Outstanding.

There are quite a few books I enjoyed reading, many more that I did not. Only a few are really impactful and this is one of them. I reviewed one of Tim Chester's earlier works, Total Church, back in 2010 (see my review here) and really liked it. I liked A Meal With Jesus a lot more.

The basic premise of A Meal With Jesus is that sharing a meal is far more than just getting a bite to eat. By looking throughout the New Testament, Tim shows us example after example of meals that Jesus was involved in and how often the meal was the setting for something profound. That is true even today. Meals shared with others represent times of fellowship, gatherings of the church, community witness and of course opportunity for mission. As Chester walks us through Luke's Gospel account, we see meals as enacted grace, enacted hope, enacted promise, etc. I am not sure if Tim would go this far but I see shared meals as even more crucial to the life and mission of the church than Sunday morning meetings.

I liked that Tim uses real examples of how this works because that helps us to see the practical and not just the theoretical but I really liked that he didn't let anecdotes take over the story. This is not a book about "How we do it and why you should to" but instead "This is how Jesus did it and why He did it and we should all do likewise". Too many books recently are nothing but a string of anecdotes with an occasional Scripture verse tossed in. A Meal With Jesus is (pun intended) a feast of God's Word. These are all stories you have read before, events in the Bible many of us know by heart but Tim manages to tie them together into a cohesiveness that is really outstanding. This is a book that made my head hurt several times, not because it was so wordy and hard to read but because of the really profound ramifications of what he has laid out. When you think about it, the Bible starts off with people eating (the forbidden fruit in the Garden) and ends with people eating (the Wedding Feast of the Lamb) and the pivotal moment in the Bible, the cross, is preceded by an intimate meal that we still remember and commemorate today.

The church lost our understanding of hospitality, fellowship and community long ago. It is even worse today than ever. With constant attention grabbing from electronics, lives stuffed full of rushing around from activity to activity and the church relegated to an hour long performance on Sunday morning, sharing meals and our lives with one another seems both quaint and impractical. Tim is calling the church back to a place where deliberate, intentional sharing of our food, our home and our time takes priority in the life of the church and I believe this can recapture some of what we have lost when it comes to being a particular people of God. I can unreservedly recommend A Meal With Jesus as a book that will open your eyes.