An unexpected—and uninvited—guest shows up at a meal with Jesus, turning the entire event on its head and revealing the surprising heart of the Gospel.

In Jesus' day, every meal was understood as the entire world in miniature. Questions of politics and religion were constant dining companions. Even something as simple as a midday snack could provoke significant controversy—and the arguments continue to reverberate 2,000 years later.

The second most famous meal Jesus attends is the miraculous feeding of 5,000 men, plus women and children. Right in the midst of a deserted place, Jesus invites everyone to God's great banquet and forms a new community that transcends every difference.

Around the table, Jesus offers the possibility to transform everything, even the very way we make sense of the world.

Jesus invites his first followers—some fishermen—to join him in his ministry. As he does so, he steps into the complex worlds of subsistence economics, imperial occupation, and tense interpersonal relationships. All of it of it comes crashing together when Jesus sits down at a table for dinner.

One of the most famous dinner scenes in Luke's Gospel comes in the midst of a short story Jesus tells. A young son abandons his family (after taking his half of the inheritance) and ends up very, very hungry.

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is led into the wilderness. In the midst of human hunger, Jesus confronts the reality of evil and clarifies his own sense of calling.

"Throughout Luke's Gospel," Robert Karris writes, "Jesus is always at a meal, going to a meal, or coming from a meal." This summer, we're joining as houseguests at some of the tables Jesus visited, beginning with the woman who taught him table manners—his mother, Mary.