All at the Feast

There are a few things that seem to be a given in our lives. One of those is to have a meal after an important event in our lives. We have meals after baptisms, confirmations, graduations, marriages, funerals and at holidays. Sometimes these meals are great events that take several days to prepare. Other times we hire others to prepare the meal. Sometimes it seems that the meal itself is more important than the event. A good example of that is the Christmas meal that seems more important than the celebration of Jesus' birth or the reception following a wedding that overawes the vows the couple take. Whatever the occasion, the meal after it is a time of gathering people together and usually, if only for a short time, does away with differences and disagreements in the family and shares some unity. Meals do that for us. In fact celebrating with a meal goes back thousands of years and may be the one thing that is common for all peoples. Isaiah certainly knew it. His vision of what it will be like when God finally gathers all of God’s people is a great feast upon the mountain. “A feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wine, of fat things full of marrow. of wine well refined,” While the feast might not sound like a feast to you, Isaiah was trying to imagine what a great feast would be like. To a community whose fair was mostly vegetarian this would sound glorious. Although, Isaiah really had no idea what that feast would consist of. None of us can imagine what that feast will be like. It will be beyond our imagination. The only thing we know is that it will be a grand event and we are invited to it not because we deserve it but because Jesus paid the price for our entrance fee.

Just like Lazarus, Jesus is standing outside the tomb of our lives calling for us to, “Come out.” Our tomb is a many-structured thing made up of our own doing and random events which meet us in the everyday happenstance of life. We are bound by our own sin and death. To us Jesus calls. He calls from the cross breaking the bonds that hold us in our selfish lifestyle. By his death and resurrection Jesus makes us new each and every day so that we can be God’s people who invite others to the great feast that Isaiah tells us about. But the feast is not the main point. God’s announcement is what the feast celebrates. For on that mountain death will be swallowed up and God will wipe away the tears from our eyes. 

While we do not know what that feast will look like we do know that it will be something new and unimaginable. Until we meet Jesus at that feast we are called to work for a better now. We are to be the ones who pick up our cross and follow Jesus. We are called to comfort the broken hearted, feed the hungry, cloth the naked, and proclaim the salvation that Jesus calls all people to. We do so, not because it is a requirement to get into that great feast, but because we have been invited even though we do not deserve it. In a small way we are to give a vision of that great feast by how we live our lives. Pick up your cross and follow Jesus so others may experience God’s love just as you have.