“THE FEAST”
Saint Luke 14. 16-24
The Second Sunday after Trinity: 17 June Anno Domini 2007
Fr Watson
Not only is America a �fast food/junk food/nibble and graze on the go� nation, but many, maybe most, �so-called-Christians� are empty husks filled with the poisons from their own blackened hearts.
Though it is a good work to feed your children and others depending upon you, it is not a virtue to try and feed yourself God. Self worked spirituality is from Satan. Though it is a good work to perform your job, vocation, and calling with initiative, creativity, and self-starting drive, it is not a virtue to try and work yourself into religious health, knowledge and standing. Synergism, i.e. �trying to work along with God� for your salvation and �feelings� of faith is a sin.
You may like making yourself a snack, you may love going to places that �let you have it your way� but your way, in matters eternal, is the way to hell.
It would not be called God�s Grace if you had a hand in it. If getting right with your Creator required your cooperation, participation, and �best efforts,� than it would be wages for work; then you would get what you had earned, what you had coming.
You don�t want what you�ve got coming. Believe that.
Grace is God�s love (in action, in salvation) for you when you don�t deserve it, and when you are in fact dead in trespasses.
The Christ�s �parable� is not a �story, fable, myth, object lesson, tale, morality play or program of instruction.� The parable of the nuptial feast is Christ; it is reality and truth; it is the Church and her Groom; and it is all.
�A certain man made a great supper and bade many.� God said let there be light and there was; no cooperation or �other cooks with their fingers in the pot� God made man in His own image and gave man all the fruits and grains of the Garden; no tilling, planting or weeding was first necessary. Man wanted to eat what He wanted to eat, when and how, and thus rejected grace and opted for works. Man rejected the gift of life and subjected himself and his heirs to the wages of works; the wages of sin; death.
God chose Abram out of Ur. The soon-to-be �Father of Nations� did nothing to participate. The Lord selected the Hebrews to be His holy (set apart) people without their co-works. Though they sinned just like you, every day in every way, the Savior nonetheless fed them with manna, quail, water, and shoes that did not wear out, for forty years. In fact, reading the Old Testament informs us that it was God feeding the Jews their entire existence with all the bounty of First Article gifts. God is the man in the parable. God�s supper is both His worldly care and provision to all, especially to His own flock, but it is also His Word of life. The Lord�s Supper has continually been placed before His sheep in His own revealed Words of Scripture.
But the Lord�s food, His Word which is the bread from heaven, is always rejected by unbelief. Ego, pride, sinful �old Adam� doesn�t want to be a lamb fed on the lap by The Shepherd. The pagan, heathen, why even your �old nature� chafes and rejects the notion of suckling the pure milk of the word like a babe at its mother�s paps.
Yet the Word is true: �God made a great supper.� It�s done complete and finished. It is there to be eaten and drunk. The Word is true: �God bade many.�
Even as you did not help cook the meal, so too, you don�t invite yourself. Nobody �crashes� this banquet.
The Supper was planned from before eternity, from before creation. The Love of the Trinity was �for you� before you, before Genesis 1.1. The Supper is eternal life and joyful companionship and communion with God and with your believing brothers and sisters. The Supper is most beautifully described in the concept of, well, a Supper. This meal is not just a regular breakfast or lunch, but a grand, once-in-an-eternity Banquet; a festive Wedding Feast.
You are Glorious, Radiant, Spotless, and Pure Bride of Christ. The gala multi-course meal is in your honor. At this table there is only laughter, contentment, vigor, wellness and Peace. Food and Talk about to you all when the Lord is your Cook, Steward, Server and Meal.
The non-believing Jews rejected Jesus as Lord and Messiah even as most of the ancient Hebrews rejected the Lord when they rebelled against Moses and the Prophets. The men in Christ�s Parable seem to reject going to the Feast for �possibly� legitimate reasons, but that too is only a self-delusional lie. The meal of the Great Man is passed by for �land, five oxen, and a �newly married� wife.� This is nothing other than unbelief attempting to reconcile itself to the universe by way of possessions, mammon, (stuff) and by works. If a Jew, or an American synergist, opts for having the five oxen of the Law; the five Books of the Pentateuch, than unless he keep that law perfectly he will be crushed and damned under the unyielding yoke of perfection.
Even when the original �chosen race� the Jews rejected God and His Anointed, the design of the Lord was not thwarted. The Jews were never to be anything more than simply the first of the family gathered around the table. When those in the parable, representing all unbelieving Hebrews, past, present and future, absented themselves from the Banquet Hall, preferring the self-made �Lake of Fire,� the Master of the House sends His servants out first into the streets and lanes (i.e. the gutters and slums) and then into the country side. The Apostles of Jesus Preached the Good News of Christ and His Work to both the believing Jewish outcasts (women, children, aged, maimed, blind, deaf, lame, dead) and then the Gentiles in all the country-sides (Samaria, Galilee, and to the ends of the earth).
You, fellow Saints, are those outcasts. You are certainly the foreigners, the non-Jewish Gentiles from all the countryside; but you are also the poor, lost, deaf, dumb and blind wounded refuse.
The Lord Himself prepared the meal in the inner workings of Trinitarian design and love. The Lord Himself finished it all, in time and place and location, when the Son kept all the ingredients pure and clean (obeyed all the Commandments) and when He offered up the final Sacrificial Lamb to be the food for all the faithful (when He suffered and died on the Cross).
The Banquet�s preparation was complete. All that remained for all the Saints to come, for the believers yet to be born, and born again, was that the Lord�s Gifts at Calvary, in Jesus� Body and Blood, would be applied and served out in the appropriate table vessels, plates and glasses. The great Cup of Washing allowed you first to drink down Jesus and all His merit when you were baptized. And the Eucharistic Supper, today and every Lord�s Day, is the continuing Meal where He feeds you His own Body and gives you to drink of His own Blood.
It is God, God the Holy Spirit Who has compelled you to believe, to be gathered, washed, fed and nourished. It is again the self-same Holy Ghost Who has brought you to Table this morning. Come in and eat and be filled.
In the Name of The Father and of + The Son and of The Holy Ghost