READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Proverbs 9:1-10
1 John 3:13-18
St. Luke 14:15-24
Grace, mercy, and peace [are yours] from God the Father and
Christ Jesus our Lord. (1 Tim 1)
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His
Church, saying:
“A man once gave a
great banquet and invited many.”
It is fitting today, as our Lord lays out His great banquet
to us in a parable, that we in turn ponder one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit
to His Church on earth, that of the Sacrament of the Altar or Holy Communion.
It is strange, when we think upon our Lord’s parables. We
find the quick lesson of “be kind” and “practice humility”, but when the main
character of the story uninvites people and then gets angry at the lack of
guests at His banquet, there begin to arise little doubts in our minds of
whether or not we got the whole story with these little morals we may or may
not listen to.
We also may wonder why it has to be a banquet or a feast
every time, for Jesus. Why can’t it be a protest or a book club or a mostly
peaceful rally? These work out just as well for passing along the message,
encouraging each other to work for the cause, and for getting the real work
done. Dinners just get in the way and are not the real work, yet God seems to
be a fan of getting in the way.
We will find truth in Exodus 24, but let me set it up.
Chapter 12 was the Passover of eating and drinking and the death of all the
first-born. Chapter 14 was the crossing of the Red Sea. 16 was the institution
of eating the Manna and the quail. 17 there were fightings. 19 God came down to
Mount Sinai and Moses goes up to receive the 10 Commandments and other
ordinances. Moses comes down, tells the people, and in 24, he goes up again,
this time with 70 witnesses.
Now, what do you suppose God did with these witnesses to
prove that the Commands Moses gave were His and that He is to be believed?
Well, they went up, they beheld God and they ate and drank, says Exodus 24:11.
In order to prove His own true presence among them and that they actually saw
God face to face, He ate and drank with them.
But that was then and this is now, you’ll say. That was the
Old Testament. We live after the New Testament. No, no ,no, no. There are not
three gods: old, new, and now. There is only one God. He is the same yesterday,
today, and tomorrow. What Jesus showed in the Old Testament, He began to do and
teach in the New, and gave the same to His chosen Apostles to continue in His
Church.
For in a re-do of this scene, Jesus takes the new Moses and
Aaron, maybe, and walks with them on the Emmaus road, also found in St. Luke’s
gospel. At that time, those two disciples were wondering if God was really
among them or not, if God had left them or not, and if God had actually died on
the cross.
After listening to them complain for quite awhile, Jesus
yells at them, “You old slowcoach!” and continues to eat and drink with them,
breaking the bread, and being revealed and known in that action specifically.
Repent. We want to take the God of the cross and turn Him
and His preaching into some ambiguous “spirit” of the cross. We want to take
the God of the tomb and turn Him into the spirit of the tomb. We want to take
the Lord of the Feast and turn Him into the spirit of the feast, making Him
invent super secret lessons of morality found only to those who can really hear
God.
Even your bulletin cover wants you to picture just some
random meal that has nothing to do with anything, because if God is really
setting up a meal on earth that He is actually serving Himself, which He says
gives forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation and we scorn or neglect it, then
that is just too much for our feeble minds to handle, because we would be lost.
Jesus is God of those things, to be sure, but He does not
try to bring you the spirit of His cross, He hangs on the cross. Jesus does not
work tirelessly to bring out the social lesson of His tomb, He lays in it for
three days, dead. Jesus Christ does not constantly bring up eating and drinking
as a window into the true nature of hospitality. He sits down at the table and
breaks the bread. Himself. Literally.
Jesus is the God of the living. He is the God Who has
created life. All of life. The breathing, the eating, and the drinking. Jesus
is fed milk from His mother’s breasts, in His humanity. Jesus feeds 5000 and
4000 men from practically nothing, in His divinity. Jesus demands the Apostles
give Him something to eat after the resurrection as the risen God-man.
There is no doubt that what Christ is paying for on the
cross is complete and perfect salvation. But we are not at the cross. It is
dust. We are not on the mountain side, being fed loaves and fish. We cannot go
to the upper room and have another Last Supper. We can not even properly
perform acts of hospitality to His liking.
We can eat the fish and cheese and fruit and ham from our
bulletins, but what is that? Just our abstract imaginations running wild. Then
satan runs in: if there is no meal, then perhaps there is no god and He has
just brought us out of Egypt to die.
You repeat, as God’s people have said before you: “Is it
because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the
wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this
what we said to you in Egypt: ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’?
For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the
wilderness” (Ex 14:11-12), with no food.
There is another option. We can take Jesus at His Word. We
can hear Him say to us, “Look, slowcoach, I said bread, I said wine, I said
eat, I said drink. Easy!”
He says in Ezekiel 37: “I will raise you from your graves
and you will know that I am the Lord, O my people” (v. 13) and “I am the
Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth
wide, and I will fill it” from Psalm 81:10.
Indeed, Jesus says, my flesh is true meat and my blood is
true drink, in St. John 6:55. This is no fish and cheese board you can find at
any Whole Foods. This is The Meal, for there really is a meal. There is a Great
Banquet and it is taking place now, in eternity, with Jesus as Host and
host.
And Jesus is here today with His Church. Does He leave the
party just to pray with us? No. He brings it. He brings the party with Him.
Where the King is, there the Kingdom is. Jesus comes to Church, not to see what
condition your condition is in, but to Commune with you.
For this Sacrament is the true Body and Blood of our Lord
Jesus Christ, in with and under the bread and wine, instituted by Christ
Himself for us Christians to eat and drink. And while our Lord was uninvited to
His own Feast, His own creation, such that He was scourged and crucified, He
does not despise the afflicted, miserable sinner.
He sets His feast specifically for them, for you. He does
not hide His Table, but prepares the Table in the presence of His enemies,
anoints heads with oil, and the cup runneth over. In this is the Wisdom of God,
which Proverbs preaches today.
He calls to the simple, the sinful, “leave your sinful ways
and live”. How? By eating and drinking what the Lord has prepared for you. By
believing and having faith in the words “given and shed for you”.
“Do not be surprised brothers”, says St. John from our
Epistle, “that the world hates you” or rather that you find yourself hating and
despising the holy Table of God. That is your sin and your red flag that you
abide in death.
But you have been brought out of death to life. You no
longer hate your brother, Who is Jesus Christ, born of St. Mary. You no longer
make excuses for shunning, despising, or neglecting His Table to which you have
been invited.
For your Savior has taken on your sins. He was the Invited
Who became uninvited in His crucifixion. He was poor, crippled, blind, and lame
under the burden of the world’s sin. But He has risen to new life, burying all
that in hell. He has ascended to the Father’s Right Hand and sends His Word,
His Invitation to the ends of the earth.
That invitation has not changed and does not change for you
today. It is the same. “Come and eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have
mixed” “for everything is now ready”. Come, “eat and drink and see God.”
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