Eating with "sinners"
I love a good quote. Last week (or was it the week before?) I read Craig L. Blomberg's "Contagious Holiness" (NSBT, Ed D.A. Carson, Illinois: IVP, 2005). It's a great survey of the meals that Jesus participates in and it looks at the way Jesus ignored the "purity" regulations of his day. Instead he focussed upon the people that he was dealing with, recognising that his purity was more "contagious" than their "impurity". Here's a great paragraph that summarises Blomberg's book really well... The unifying theme that emerges from the passages surveyed... may be called "contagious holiness". Jesus regularly associates with the various sorts of sinners on whom the most pious in his culture frowned, but his association is never an end in itself. Implicitly or explicitly, he is calling people to change their ways and follow him as their master. But unlike so many in his world... he does not assume that he will be defiled by