Children read the world’s classification charts before they read textbooks. They grow up in a reality where the place one lives determines one's worth, where a parent’s financial status functions like a measure of ability, and where grades become a ranking of character. We call this “order,” but in children’s eyes, it is a hierarchy. Invisible lines are drawn. This side and that side, the high-achieving child and the one who isn’t. Children grow up learning this way of distinguishing people.
Even in the time of the Gospels, there was a line. The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus sat at the table with sinners in the house of Levi, the tax collector. At that time, Jewish society divided people into “the clean” and “the unclean” through purity laws. The dining table was not merely a matter of etiquette but a boundary in the way of seeing life.
The way children today divide their friends based on grades and apartment size resembles how people in those days divided others according to purity laws. The line has changed, but the method of classification is all too familiar.
Yet rather than explaining or challenging those boundaries, Jesus simply sat down at that table with them. That table was a place where boundaries were erased through his very presence. It was not a place that screened who could enter, but a place where no one was pushed away. The radical nature of the Gospel begins at the table.
Luke 10 continues with the story of the “Good Samaritan.” A lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus does not provide criteria for classification. Instead, he reframes the question: “Who proved to be a neighbor to this man?” It was not a study of how to identify a neighbor, but a study of how to become a neighbor.
Jesus’s “question” and the practice of “emptying oneself.” Standing by one another and discerning, rather than determining hierarchy and boundaries, goes so far as to say, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children…” This statement is not a call to reject one’s family, but rather an invitation not to absolutize blood ties. It is a call to face the reality that even family can become a basis for division.
Jesus’s teaching was not a technique for determining who is more right, but a practice in learning whose side to stand on. Jesus’s method of “questioning” and “emptying” is perfected here. It is a matter of discerning which lines to erase, rather than what to add.
This practice is first put to the test within the family. On the day a child’s grades drop, asking about their feelings before discussing the results. It is the attitude of not accepting an atmosphere where those who excel academically are treated with greater respect. It is the choice not to laugh off discriminatory jokes about your neighborhood or background. Children learn through their parents’ reactions. They discern where lines are drawn and where they are erased.
The world teaches hierarchy, and we raise our children within it. Yet we cannot help but ask: Is this really the only path? The Gospel invites us to look at boundaries anew. It prompts us to reflect on the lines we’ve drawn so easily and held onto for so long. Were they drawn to push someone out, or did they harden as we claimed to be protecting something? And it silently shows us another place—a place where we sit together.
Perhaps family is not a finished community, but a place of practice where we gradually erase those lines. Could our dining table today be a place not for judging others, but for listening to one another’s lives and discernments? That question lingers quietly.
