Finger, Reta Halteman |Of Widows and Meals

Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts
Reta Halteman Finger

Paperback: Eerdmans, 2007, 326 pp.

Introduction

In her book, Of Widows and Meals, Reta Halteman Finger provides a robust understanding of the meals that were shared by the early Jerusalem church in Acts 2 and 6. Through detailed sociological and historical research, she demonstrates that these meals were not only historical, but that the church developed a system in which these meals were sustainable despite their economic situation. Her work seeks to counteract much scholarly work that is rooted and shaped more by middle-class, Western, capitalistic assumptions over the actual social and lived reality of first century culture. To counteract this bent, Finger consciously brings three interpretive presuppositions that guide her: 1) recognizing the importance of social location; 2) looking through the eyes of the poor; and 3) looking through the eyes of women (6-11). Through all of this, Finger hopes that the church can move beyond seeing these passages as a choice between communism and capitalism, but rather as a lived expression and proclamation of the kingdom of God, which attracts more and more people to Jesus.

Radical Kinship

For most Westerners, identity is shaped by individuality with little attention paid to the group to which they are attached, but this was not the case in the first century. Finger writes, “In this culture, persons were not known as individuals (as in Western society today) but were embedded in a kin group, from which they derived their identity” (128). And the family was the number one kin group, the center of meaning from which people understood who they were and where they belonged. But Jesus upended this, establishing a fictive kin group—the community of disciples—that superseded loyalty to the blood family. 

Finger observes, “At one level, the story of the beginning of the church in Jerusalem is the story of disparate people being melded into one family, one kin group” (132). And this disparate group even included enemies, those accused of indirectly crucifying Jesus. This fictive kin group is what made the message of Jesus so attractive to others, but was also a necessity for survival. “The reconstitution of the fictive kin group meant physical as well as spiritual survival, since without it the lack of relationship and connections doomed first-century Mediterraneans to destitution and starvation” (277).

Participatory Worship

Because of the new fictive kin group of the church, the community depended on each other to such a degree that their survival depended on radical sharing of their resources. In Western capitalistic society, we tend to see wealth and/or goods as the means for further accumulation, but again this was not the case in first century Jerusalem. “Since wealth was rarely used to produce more wealth (as in capitalism), its proper use was not to spend it on luxuries for oneself but to share it with others in order to gain honor, a core value in this society” (143). When Acts 2:45 speaks about selling property and possessions, what seems likely is “that they sold whatever real estate or other possessions they had that would not be of use to the community, keeping what was useful and distributing it to or sharing it with any who needed it” (234). The sharing of resources was a central aspect of their communal worship in which all members participate; whereas too often this aspect in the Western church is separated out from worship and typically seen as charity or outreach.

The issue concerning the neglected widows in Acts 6 also has to do with the participation of these women over and against them being in need of charity. Finger notes, “Feminist scholars provide new insights by placing these women in the position of subjects rather than objects of charity” (95). This is more in line with Jesus’s subversion of traditional gender roles. For the church, then, they saw the widows not as charity cases needing help, but as members to incorporate fully into the life of the congregation. Finger writes, “What better way to incorporate previously unattached (and thus underpaid) widows into the community than to put them to work on the daily communal meals that were the primary activity around which the physical, social, and spiritual life of the believers took place?” (213-214).

Table Worship-Fellowship

“The communal meal is the primary aspect of the community of goods” (50). Because of the new kin group, and because of the active participation of all believers, the table became the lived reality of the kingdom of God for the fledgling church– so much so that the table fellowship became the place where social hierarchies were destroyed, and enemies became friends. In the first century, every meal in some sense was considered religious. Finger notes that for Jews, “disputes about commensality concerned the shape of the community that was truly loyal to Yahweh” (178). 

Because Jesus broke these norms through his dining habits, the early church also sought to continue to live this. “By eating together across social boundaries, believers actually teach and preach Jesus’s theology. The Supper itself becomes an act of proclamation” (185). The church’s commensality demonstrated to a highly stratified Roman culture their unity and equality, which people found highly inviting. Unfortunately, the diversity exhibited and proclaimed by the early church “runs counter to the Great American Dream and to the growth of sprawl as new developments of large homes and gated communities move into the countryside” (285). The challenge for the American church is to cut against the homogeneity that characterizes too many churches. We lament the declining attendance, but rarely do we stop to consider the subversive acts that the first century church engaged in that allowed the Lord to add to their number daily.