This is the Church’s high festival. Therefore, let us first consider Christianity as a feast.
CHRISTIANITY AS A FEAST
This is a fact which we often forget and which most people outside the Church simply will not believe. There is quite good reason for this disbelief; most of us Christians look so shockingly underfed—spiritually. But there is no excuse for our forgetting it. It is continually dinned into our ears by the Bible (that is, of course, if we read the Bible). It is equally evident in the hymnbook. And one of the two foci of Christian worship is a meal—the Lord’s Supper. Now to go through the evidence for this would be useful, but it might be tedious. I will leave it to you. You shall look in the Old Testament where people “saw God and they eat and drink”; where the prophets call upon people to come for free meals, because God is so anxious that they be fed, that he is giving the food away. And you shall see Jesus earning the title a “glutton and a wine bibber” and hear him more than once compare the coming of the Kingdom of God to a great feast. Again, in the hymnbook you shall read Charles Wesley’s urgent summons “Come Sinners to the Gospel Feast.” You shall check my evidence if you wish. I shall be content with amplifying the conclusion—the Gospel is a Feast. This is the day of days on which to recall and understand that fact.
I am not going to expound it fully but consider some few things which are involved. If it is a feast it means the satisfaction of human hunger. All of us are deeply moved by the news of the starving people of Europe today. None can think of children growing up stunted and deformed, children who will be in poor health all their lives, and without honor. Nor can we think of old folk, cold and hungry, dying prematurely, without a shudder. It is very right that such thoughts should wake us to be content with our rations, so that we say, “even if there are no bananas, not many eggs, thank you God it is not like that here.” Yes, but as Christians we have more than that to look at, and the sight of many of our own sleek and well-fed countrymen is, or ought to be, as agonizing as the picture of Greek children. I know, they don’t feel hungry. That’s the tragedy of it. That doesn’t mean that all is well. A missionary told me of malnutrition in India. “A good quantity of rice,” he said, “will fill the stomach, make you feel full,” but it hasn’t got the food values that are needed.
So with us. Our people fill their heads and souls with stuff that satisfies them without giving them true nutrition. The Gospel feast really satisfies. If the Gospel is a feast, it means fellowship. A feast, I said, not a public dinner. You have probably been, as I have, at a funeral dinner where you exchanged half a dozen brief remarks with your neighbors, and never really got beyond passing “the salt please” and the abominable weather. I don’t call that a feast. It may be a meal, even a good meal, but not a feast. When I think of a feast I think of the barbaric lines of the medieval hymn—“the shout of them that triumph/the song of them that feast.” Or if you will not think me irreverent, I think of a bump supper at Cambridge. Or to be a little more dignified but still in Cambridge of our Founder’s Feast, where we all meet who owe a debt to Mary de St. Pol who lived 600 years ago and who was a great and munificent lady. A feast means real fellowship. And therefore it means real joy. One could talk about these things forever. The Gospel is a feast, the Church is a festival. Why do we forget it? Why do we go about looking like a wet cat? Why do we dishonor Christ in this way? In view of Easter, in view of all the gladness of it, let us hear Paul’s words—“let us keep the festival!” But I have not finished. I should be saying that if you thought I was giving way to an unbridled enthusiasm to a light-heartedness that borders on light-headedness, this can never be if we consider both the origin and the consequences of our feast.
ITS ORIGIN—THE NEW PASSOVER
Paul, as ever, is arguing here. “Wherefore,” he says, “let us keep the feast.” What does that “wherefore” mean? What has he just said? “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us.” I have already said something about the Old Passover. Paul here takes it up in a dark picture. Just as the Passover lamb meant safety and deliverance to the Jews, so does Christ in his death mean that to us. We have all the gladness that the Passover feast suggests, all the good things, but we are never to forget what it cost.
That is why a Christian, the most joyful person in the world, never loses his poise, never loses his sense of responsibility, and never develops a swelled head. He never supposes that his own deserts have won for him the privileges he enjoys. He never forms the idea that they are a natural right of his. It is no doubt natural for Mr. H.G. Wells to talk about the rights of humankind; a Christian knows he has no rights and is profoundly thankful he is not getting his deserts.
Our sense of infinite indebtedness to Jesus Christ is profoundly humbling; all our privileges, all our joy, are his gift not our achievement, his bounty not our earning. Yet at the same time it gives us a proper sense of dignity, the only dignity a person can have without becoming arrogant. We perceive that in ourselves we are worth nothing; but Christ has created worth in us and for us. Christ died and rose again that we might be, not ourselves, but his new creation. The status that we now have is not our own but his. This means no lack of joy, but a deep seriousness.
You will recall how the epistle to the Hebrews recoils in horror from those who treat the blood of Christ as a profane thing—an ordinary, trivial, insignificant affair. Yet I have known Christians who did seem to do something very much like that, who were so familiar for the whole thing that it never moved them. I will say two perfectly plain practical things that could be said: 1) I cannot conceive how any Christian, hearing this, can entertain a hard thought about a brother or sister Christian; 2) I cannot conceive how any Christian, without the gravest reason, can entirely absent himself on the Lord’s Day from the presentation of the Word of the Cross, and the Communion of the broken body and shed blood of our Lord. Now we consider its consequences—purgation.
PURGATION
The edition of the Passover Haggadah which I possess is a cheap one, but it has a good selection of traditional pictures. On the first page you will see a reverent and bearded old gentleman carrying a candle in his hand. He is looking for leaven. With the Passover feast is associated that of the Unleavened Bread, and before the festival began, all the leavened bread had to be disposed of. It was not unnatural that leaven should come to be regarded as a symbol of evil, of moral evil. So St. Paul can use the metaphor. Leaven stands for malice and wickedness. To have purged it out means sincerity and truth. His command comes in its customary form. “You are unleavened,” he says, “because of what Christ has done, therefore be unleavened.” Christ has worked your salvation, now do you work it out.
The feast is set, he calls us to rejoice with him on this festival day, and to live in joy forever with him. But that has its consequences and obligations. If you are to come to the wedding meal, put on a wedding garment. Purge out the old leaven; ask him to cleanse you. Cry out to him, “I am undone, but do not depart from me. Come to me thyself, purge me from every stain, open the door on which thou knockest, come in that we may feast together, and that henceforth life may have that sober gaiety of the feast of the Kingdom of God.”
Quite literally, the feast of Christ is before us. Soon I shall be saying, “you who do truly and earnestly repent of your sins, draw near with faith and take the holy sacrament to thy comfort.” Will you do so as a pledge that you want to clean up your life, that you want to enter now into a life of fellowship with living Christ?
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“AS IF NOT”—1 Corinthians 7.29–31
[Preached eighteen times from 4/22/73 at Langley Park to 3/14/96 at Coxhoe]
That is a long and complicated text, and it may appear to have very little to do with the theme that is in the mind of us all on this Stewardship Sunday. It is true that the Corinthians were getting very bothered about the whole question of marriage, whether or not it was right to have a wife or husband. If you had one—how to treat it, if you
