IN 1967, interracial marriage was still illegal in much of the United States. Yet that was the year that the ninth and final pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn was released: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a romantic comedy-drama about an interracial couple trying to find acceptance from their respective parents. The couple was played by Katharine Houghton, Hepburn’s niece, and Sidney Poitier, who had made history four years earlier as the first African-American to win the coveted Best Actor Oscar. The film was a box-office success, and garnered ten Academy Award nominations, winning two: one for the screenplay and the other for Spencer Tracy as Best Actor.

Much has changed in American mass media since 1967. Even television commercials strive for diverse representations, and interracial couples are common. But that’s not to say, of course, that racial or other kinds of prejudice have disappeared. We still have a hard time breaking down or sometimes even noticing the ways we think in terms of in-groups and out-groups, us versus them.

Nor have we stopped bringing those prejudices to the dinner table (at least, when we actually take the time to eat dinner together at one table). The dinner table is meant to be a place of belonging, and however polite the conversation may seem, newcomers to that table are being evaluated to see if they fit.

Even in the first century, for Jews to sit together at the dinner table was a mark of fellowship, of family. It’s understandable, then, that the Pharisees, who prized ritual purity, would be aghast at the way Jesus seemed perfectly content to dine with those whom the Pharisees would have considered unclean riffraff. Moreover, we probably shouldn’t imagine Jesus being the ill-tempered and annoying dinner guest, as if he would rather be somewhere else. To anyone looking on, he would have seemed to be enjoying himself.

Thus, when Levi, whom we know as Matthew, threw a party after Jesus called him to be a disciple, Luke tells us that the Pharisees objected to the guest list:

Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” (Luke 5:29-30, NIV)

Matthew was probably fairly well off, no doubt due to his past shady practices as a tax-gatherer. When Luke says in the previous verse that Matthew “left everything” to follow Jesus, that doesn’t have to mean that he sold his house and belongings; more likely, it means that he stopped being a tax collector. In some ways, that may have been more of a sacrifice than, say, Peter’s, for it would have been easier for Peter to go back to fishing than for Matthew to go back to collecting taxes for Rome. But he seems to have made the sacrifice gladly, throwing a banquet to celebrate.

Again, Mark’s version of the story suggests that the other tax collectors on the guest list were probably already following Jesus in some way. Whether the scrupulous and self-righteous Pharisees knew that or not, it hardly mattered. Somehow, some Pharisees and their scribes (for not all Pharisees were scribes, nor were all scribes Pharisees) could see that Jesus was sharing a table with tax collectors and people they considered to be “sinners.” The meal may have been held outdoors, or they may have posed their question as the party broke up and the guests were leaving. Why, the Pharisees demanded, would someone who’s supposed to be a respectable teacher eat with such a disreputable crowd?

The complaint was directed to the disciples, but Jesus is the one who answered the question:

Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (vss. 31-32)

It’s an apt answer from someone who had recently healed a paralytic by pronouncing his sins forgiven. I’m also reminded of the story that will come much later in Luke’s gospel, about a repentant tax collector named Zacchaeus. When Zacchaeus pledged to make ample reparation to anyone he had cheated, Jesus replied, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:9-10).

In both cases, Jesus responded by voicing his mission: to heal the sick, to seek and to save, to call sinners to repentance. Fellowship in his kingdom was not based on in-groups and out-groups defined by religious tradition or principle, nor by ethnic prejudice. It was to be an inclusive fellowship that welcomed anyone from any walk of life who knew that they were sick of soul and needed to repent of their sin and turn to Jesus.

The lesson for us is clear, even if difficult to apply in practice. First, we should be wary (ironically) of the way we might apply us-versus-them thinking to the Pharisees, as if they were the one-dimensional villains of the story. The Pharisees are not simply “them”; they are “us.” They are anyone, any believer, who unthinkingly applies taken-for-granted criteria of social acceptability to separate those who belong from those who do not.

And if that’s so, then second, we have to ask ourselves when we’re doing it. What do we do, for example, when we encounter someone new at church? Do we ever feel a reflexive need to pull away, to keep our distance? Why? Is it the color of their skin? The way they dress or talk? Do they have too many tattoos (even if some of them say “Jesus”)?

I’m not saying that anything goes. Nor am I saying that everyone by default belongs in a Christian fellowship. But I am saying that we need to be asking the right questions. Belonging isn’t about whether someone is black or white, rich or poor, Democrat or Republican; it’s about whether a person is moving away from sin and toward Jesus, even if that movement is sometimes awkward.

And that goes for whether we belong too.