The table is a tangible and salient image of the common good. Think of it this way: we spend most of our lives around tables. We gather around them to eat. We sit at them with a warm cup of chai. We stack books on them at the local library. They’re attached to the back of every seat on an airplane and create community spaces on train cars. Tables, like the possibility of a common good, are all around us. They exist in ordinary spaces where people gather, converse, read, eat, and worship. The table represents the practice of intentional hospitality—of making room when we are under no obligation to do so.
When we center our communities around the table, we consider how much food is available, how many chairs can fit comfortably, what each person is bringing, and how to make space when someone knocks at the door asking if there is room for a few more. A table offers us a sacred place of belonging with an invitation to join. When neighbors are brought together in this way, we can completely and radically reimagine what our common life looks like.
What I find powerful about the table is that it centers our humanity through the shared experience of hunger. The table provides us with a simple task: take and eat. As our bodies are physically nourished by the food spread across the table, our souls are spiritually nourished as the stories contained in the meal are shared. In this shared proximity, we are reminded that our flourishing is interdependent.
The table has long been tied to the Christian practice of neighboring. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is often found at or around the table. He eats with Mary and Martha, infusing their table interaction with spiritual weight (Luke 10:38–42). He miraculously feeds five thousand who gathered to hear him speak and perform miracles, turning a shoreline into a gigantic table of providence (Matt. 14:13–21).
Jesus also uses the table to subvert the social order of his day by dining with those who were considered outcasts or impure. At a dinner with religious leaders, Jesus is anointed by a woman with an alabaster jar of precious ointment (Luke 7:36–38). He calls Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector, down from a tree and invites him to the table (Luke 19:1–10). At a gathering with religious leaders, Jesus teaches that they ought to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” rather than the rich and notable members of their community (Luke 14:12–14). Around the table, Jesus proclaims that tax collectors and sex workers will enter the kingdom ahead of the religious elite of his time (Matt. 21:31–32; Mark 2:15; Luke 11:37–54).
In his gospel, John places the table at the heart of Christian community. During the Last Supper, Jesus teaches his disciples that “he had come from God and was going to God” (13:3) by bending down to wash their feet while they reclined at the table. After modeling this path of service, humility, and sacrifice, Jesus then offers his final instructions and fuses his teaching into a practice of blessing, breaking, and giving of bread and wine. It is fitting that this table practice defines God’s people: communion.
Of course, Jesus’s table fellowship does not end at the Last Supper. In his resurrected body, Jesus walks with two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is in the middle of dining and breaking bread with them that the two strangers see that they are in the presence of Jesus (Luke 24:13–35). When describing his future ascension, Jesus explains that he must go and prepare a place for his followers (John 14:3), a place described as a great banquet table (Isa. 25:6; 55:1–2; Matt. 8:11–12). If we are looking for Christ in the world today, we will likely find him at the table.
When describing his future ascension, Jesus explains that he must go and prepare a place for his followers (John 14:3), a place described as a great banquet table.
It does not take long, though, to see that the church has failed to live up to this vision of the table. Working against the common good in our communities today often doesn’t look like crusades, chattel slavery, or colonial expansion. It looks like Christians who practice rigid exclusion by building spiritual—and sometimes physical—walls around their tables and placing guards at the gate. It also looks like reckless inclusion, where Christians open the doors to their table but fail to practice true hospitality by considering what it means to have a diverse collection of people gathered together.
We also work against the common good when we fail to reckon with the lived experiences of our neighbors in and beyond the pews. This looks like preachers who emphatically pound their pulpits with the American flag on their right side, preaching a message of “God, guns, and glory” while students don’t feel safe in the classroom; like calls to repentance that end with tepid platitudes like “be kind to your coworker” while protestors march in the streets outside to decry systems of injustice and exploitation; like Christmas sermons that celebrate Christ as a refugee king but fail to acknowledge the humanity of refugees and asylum seekers at the southern border; like Bible studies that encourage attendees to serve the “least of these” while ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers disappear undocumented immigrants in their congregation; and like pastors who praise an indescribable, uncontainable, unfathomable, waymaker God but cannot fathom what it might look like to create space for queer people in their sanctuary.
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To meaningfully come to the table, we cannot begrudgingly sit in the farthest seat with our hands cupped over our ears. We must become people who desire the table. We must be willing to be formed by and toward life together with our neighbors. As Pope Francis explains, “It is one thing to feel forced to live together, but something entirely different to value the richness and beauty of those seeds of common life that need to be sought out and cultivated.”
To rightly come to the table, we must be compelled by and drawn to spaces where difference and diversity are treated as gifts. To do this, we must cultivate a faith that is formed by and toward love for our neighbors. The formation of faith through devotion to God directly transforms our desires. Saint Augustine describes this process as the ability to discern what God has given us to use (usus) and to enjoy (fruitio). To enjoy something is to love something—like God and our neighbors—for its own sake. To use something is to care about that thing because it brings us closer to what we enjoy. For example, we desire the common table because it provides a shared space for us to love our neighbors. The table is used toward the pursuit of a greater enjoyment of God and others.
What keeps Christians from the table is that we get this wrong: we enjoy the things we should use, and we use the things we should enjoy. Augustine illustrates this by describing a community residing in a foreign land whose only desire is to return home. As they embark on this journey, though, they become so infatuated with the horses, carriages, and ships transporting them that they forget about the very place to which they are going. Augustine’s point isn’t that horses and ships are not worthy of our attention, but rather that the travelers loved them so much that they forgot their true and ultimate love: their homeland. The travelers mistook what was only meant to be used as something to enjoy.
The same is true today when Christians enjoy the table as our highest pursuit but then neglect to care for the people present at it. We begin to love the table so much that we never get up from it and move out into the world to serve others. We also see this disordered desire among Christians who treat power, control, influence, and prestige as something to enjoy rather than to use for the greater good of our community. These are a clear sign that our desires are malformed.
What will bring us to the table of shared, communal flourishing is a desire to enjoy both God and neighbor in and for themselves. In other words, our love of God directs and catalyzes our love of neighbor, just as the enjoyment of our neighbor orients and energizes our love for God. We do not love our neighbors to get something greater from them or from God. We love our neighbors because they, made in the image of God, are worthy of love. We seek their good and well-being because they are our neighbors. We care about the quality and depth of these relationships because Jesus tells us this is the path to relationships of mutual flourishing. We come to the table because the people we love are there too.
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After Jesus’s ascension into heaven, his followers return to the table in an anxious waiting for what might happen next. What will become of this unlikely community that has joined together on the Way? How will they live together in the absence of Christ’s dwelling among them?
The answer arrives in a miraculous way. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends on those gathered in Jerusalem like a flame caught up in a violent wind and fills the home where the first followers of Jesus are gathered. The Holy Spirit, though, does not come with a single, unifying tongue that those gathered could all understand. Instead, she comes in “divided tongues, as of fire,” giving those present the ability to speak in their own tongue (Acts 2:3–4).
The first act of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is the mysterious and paradoxical work of joining. Pentecost is a simultaneously fantastic and intimate moment. Indeed, to hear one’s native tongue in an unexpected moment is often an emotional experience. In a chaotic and sudden moment, the foreigner and refugee hear God speak in their native language. In a new land, they recognize the percussive tones and familiar timbre spoken by their loved ones—their auntie and abuelita. By coming in a multitude of languages, the Spirit beckons those gathered to unite as followers of Jesus by embracing and asking one another, “What did God say to you?”
To understand God’s revelation, these followers must participate in loving community across their many differences. Yes, this is where the work of joining begins for the Christian church. Pentecost is not what these spirit-longing people asked for or expected, but it is the gift God has for them. It is the disruptive, baffling, and holy work of forming a new community.
Following Jesus’s example of radical table fellowship, the shared table became a source of spiritual and physical nourishment for the early church (Acts 2:46). It is through the mediation of a shared table that Jews and gentiles learned to live together under the lordship of Christ (Acts 10:9–16; 11:1–18). The New Testament letters written by the leaders of the early church also contain instruction about enjoying and sharing in this fellowship (1 Cor. 10:15–17), calling the church to practice hospitality (Heb. 13:2; 1 Pet. 4:9) and show no partiality (James 2:1–13). In the book of Revelation, John describes a divine vision of an eternal meal: the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev. 9:6–10).
This joining work, though, is not easy. As the memory of Pentecost begins to fade, the struggles of finding a common good amid a multitude of differences become evident. Fraught with all the complexities that accompany humans attempting to live together, in ordinary time, the early church navigated and negotiated within a world divinely called to unity in difference. Philip must love and baptize an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8); Peter must break bread with a Roman named Cornelius (Acts 10); Jews and gentiles must share a community (Acts 15); Paul must find God in the altars of Athens (Acts 17); and believers like Timothy who live between Jewish and gentile heritage must question if this ethnic straddling is an obstacle to gospel proclamation (Acts 16).
Gathered under the lordship of Christ, zealots and tax collectors, enslaved and free, rich and poor, eunuchs and sex workers, beggars and bankers, fishermen and scholars, magicians and stargazers all learned to dwell together, share food and drink, carry one another’s burdens, love deeply, and join together in radical, table intimacy.
The faith demonstrated by the early church is markedly a faith in Christ for others. It is a faith that emphasizes a positive intervention in the lives of those we love. It is a faith that moves mountains and hearts. It is a faith that overcomes the systems and structures designed to exclude so that we might create communities that flourish together. It is a faith that reimagines communities and redesigns the spaces we inhabit to form us toward love and hope.
Faith and desire, when rightly formed by the light of Christ, have the immense and incredible power to bring about a common good for our communities. Directed by and toward love, the gaze of our imagination, dreams, and creative energies will also shift from our individual comfort to the needs of our neighbors. To imagine in this way is to create and dream of new ways of being in and relating to the world. This godly imagination of wholeness helps us recognize the beauty of our traditions and the good desire to place our experience alongside those around us. This recognition stirs in us the holy desire to become more loving, empathic, just, and hospitable people.
When our faith is formed toward love, how we imagine the world begins to change. This creative work of imagination at the table is a compelling and beautiful witness to the gospel of Christ today that does not prescribe a set of beliefs but instead invites others to participate in a story still being told. We gather at the table to tell a story of flourishing and goodness that is still being written. I believe this is what God is calling us to.
This article is adapted from Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local by Amar Peterman ©2026 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
Amar D. Peterman is an Indian American scholar working at the intersection of faith and public life. He is the author of Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local. You can learn more about his work at amarpeterman.com.
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