In his daily practice, Jesus rebelled calmly against the deepest rules of his world. He lived his own parable of the Banquet and the injunctions of the master in it: “Go therefore to the thoroughfare and invite to the marriage feast as many as you can find.” In the parable, the master’s servants “went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found,” both bad and good, so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

In his daily life, Jesus made a point of sitting down with every kind of person, even outcasts. Jesus’ table had the freedom from man-made rules and concepts and differentiations of the Kingdom itself.

Just as the table of the Pharisees was a mirror in miniature of the hierarchical world they lived in and strove to keep alive, so Jesus’ table—where outcasts ate with unmarried women and tax collectors and apostles all together with Jesus himself—was a mirror of the all-embracing mercy and compassion of the Kingdom, a mirror, in fact, of the supreme feast and Sacred Marriage of matter and spirit, heart and body, heaven and earth to which God was always summoning the whole of humanity.

from Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ