No Free Lunch?

Why is it so many life lessons are best learned at a table? For example, I have a couple of dear friends who, like me, love to eat. I’ve probably sat at a table with these two guys hundreds of times. Oddly, though, I don’t remember ever sitting down with both of them at the same time. That would be a memorable event because they both insist on picking up the check. If we all three met for dinner, I have no doubt that it would be a marvelous time of fraternal association. Until the server brought the bill and they both reached for it. Eschatological pandemonium might ensue, prematurely ushering in the millennium. At the very least, there is a strong possibility that a fist fight would break out and we’d be permanently disinvited from that establishment.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing these guys. Along with many other endowments of the Spirit, they both possess the gift of giving. Would you rather be friends with people who are supernaturally inclined to share, or be surrounded by people who are to your finances what a black hole is to its celestial neighbors? Besides, I have the gift of receiving.

And there are some major players in the Bible who were, themselves, loath to freeload. In Genesis 14, Abram refused a gift from a king he’d just rescued because, he said, “I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the strap of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say, ‘I made Abram rich.'”

A few chapters later (Genesis 23), Abram, mourning his recently deceased wife, Sarah, haggled over the price of a burial plot with its owner. What’s unusual about their negotiations is that the owner is the one who offered to give Abram the plot free and clear and Abram is the one bargaining to pay fair market value.

In 2 Samuel 24, a man named Araunah offered to give King David his threshing floor (and his oxen and implements) so that David could offer a sacrifice to God. David refused to let Araunah pick up the check. “No,” David said. “I insist on paying for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.”

Granted, rewards for military rescue, burial plots and threshing floors are not dynamically equivalent to the sometimes awkward after-dinner debate about the check. But in all these instances, someone insists on paying his own way and then some. There is, in many of us, a strong streak of independence. No favors needed. No handouts accepted.

Which complicates our Christianity because favor is at the heart of our faith. The kind of favor that is unmerited, undeserved, unearned and unreturnable.

Do you think it’s possible that our self-reliance is one of the reasons the Lord’s Supper sometimes feels less than meaningful? Maybe we’re not entirely comfortable with someone else picking up the check. It’s as if we’re channeling Abram, except instead of being made rich by someone we rescued, we’re being made righteous by someone who rescued us.

When you come to the table today, you aren’t going to pick up the tab. You don’t get to ask for separate checks. You can’t even leave a tip. Whoever said there’s no free lunch, didn’t spend enough time in the Bible. The Lord’s Table may be the only place in world where it’s not just permissible to be a freeloader; it’s required.