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Created for the Feast
by Kyle Plattner | Peoria, Illinois
We were created for feasting—both with our Creator and one another. Few acts are imbued with as much spiritual and eternal significance as feasting. This is easy to miss or sideline as moderns who tend to disconnect earthly realities from heavenly worship. Our Western sensibilities favor the contemplation of abstract ideas and concepts to the physicality of ritual participation. And so matters of eating and drinking can appear to be irrelevant to our faith and worship. We overlook the rite that is performed, looking for the idea we think it represents.
The hunger, the food, and then the thanks we return back to God are all meant to make Him known to us.
From the beginning it was not so. Adam was brought up from the dust in a garden full of food, and then given a hunger for it. We were created to need food. All of us must receive life from outside ourselves; namely from our Father, who graciously filled the garden with trees to eat freely from. The hunger, the food, and then the thanks we return back to God are all meant to make Him known to us.
The chief end of man is to be in fellowship with his Creator. And a shared table is the place that God has chosen to make that fellowship most clearly visible in the world He made. Feasting has a central role in redemptive history—from Melchizedek to Joseph and his brothers, the seventy elders on Sinai, and so on. Tabernacle and temple sacrifices ended with the priest eating in the presence of Yahweh. God, in His kindness, directly commanded the observance of regular feasts. And, of course, Jesus used the imagery of feasting more than any other to describe the reality of His kingdom. The renewed and fulfilled creation in the eschatological kingdom of God takes the specific form of a feast. A marriage supper is the aim of history. God desires His people to know Him and one another at a shared table—communal fellowship.
We don’t just eat to merely stay alive, a truth even secular cultures recognize. Alexander Schmemann makes this keen observation in his book, For the Life of the World:
“Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. A meal is still a rite—the last ‘natural sacrament’ of family and friendship, of life that is more than ‘eating’ and ‘drinking.’ To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that ‘something more’ is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.”
We feast to express and experience fellowship with those we love. We hunger for fellowship, not just food. This is shared universally across every culture that has ever existed. Consider how otherwise irreligious people still share a meal to celebrate a marriage or an important business deal. This sacramental instinct is imprinted deeply on every soul.
We feast to express and experience fellowship with those we love. We hunger for fellowship, not just food.
When Christ comes into the world, He comes as bread that is broken for His people and drinks the cup of New Covenant. He becomes the new high priest, the new and better Adam. He led the way back into Eden, making all His brothers to be priests of New Creation. Similar to Israel’s priests, we are privileged to eat of the offering. And just like them, when we eat, we are made participants in the sacrifice (1 Corinthians 10:16-18). Yahweh receives us as living sacrifices, following Christ onto the altar. He is there with us, present in the suffering, as well as in the feasting.
Communion is our taste of restored table fellowship with our Father. By the mercies of His Son, we are called to partake freely of all that Christ is for us—proclaiming the death that unites His body, the church.
And what do we have to offer up to God when all that we have is given to us in Christ? He is our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanctification, and redemption (1 Corinthians 1:30). He is the Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7). For what do we have that we did not receive?
In some sense, every meal eaten by mankind is a symbol of our need to receive life from outside ourselves.
Our Father gave us both the hunger and the bread that would satisfy that hunger. In some sense, every meal eaten by mankind is a symbol of our need to receive life from outside ourselves. And when the body gathers to receive Christ in the bread and the wine, that symbol becomes reality. We are offering back up to God all that He has freely given to us in the grace of His Son (Romans 12:1). Schmemann articulates this more beautifully that I can:
“And we [partake of communion] in remembrance of Him because, as we offer again and again our life and our world to God, we discover each time that there is nothing else to be offered but Christ Himself—the Life of the world, the fullness of all that exists. It is His Eucharist, and He is the Eucharist. As the prayer of offering says—"it is He who offers and it is He who is offered." We come again and again with our lives to offer; we bring and "sacrifice"—that is, give to God-what He has given us; and each time we come to the End of all sacrifices, of all offerings, of all eucharist, because each time it is revealed to us that Christ has offered all that exists, and that He and all that exists has been offered in His offering of Himself. We are included in the Eucharist of Christ and Christ is our Eucharist.”
When we taste the sacramental meal, we are tasting the goodness of the resurrection life to come. Under God’s blessing, and acting as image bearers, we glorify the seed yielding plants and fruit bearing trees given to us in the garden into bread and wine. When these good gifts are enjoyed in His presence, with grateful hearts, we are reentering Eden. And in the fullness of time, it will be a marriage supper within a glorified garden city, New Jerusalem.
“Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11).
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