These are your instructions for eating this meal: Be fully dressed, wear your sandals, and carry your walking stick in your hand. Eat the meal with urgency, for this is the LORD’s Passover. Exodus 12:11 NLT
This time of year, many are preparing a holiday dinner. Tables will be laden with a vast assortment of family favorites, delicacies, and my all-time love, desserts. The delicious smells of homemade hot rolls, turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and pumpkin pie will fill the air in our kitchen.
My favorite virtual feast though, is the one in the movie Hook. A starving Peter Pan (Robin Williams) sits down to a long, bare table with empty pots and dishes until his imagination sparks. Suddenly, a massive feast appears, followed by a rollicking food fight.
Feasts are frequent in the Bible. Israel celebrates several throughout the year, appointed by God. The first and most important is Passover. The Israelites, about to be freed from slavery under Pharoah after the final plague, are told by Moses to sacrifice and roast a lamb. They are to eat it with bitter herbs, fruit of the vine, and unleavened bread. They must paint over their doors the blood of the lamb so the Angel of Death will pass over them that night. And in the morning, they would leave for the Promised Land.
Passover points to the Last Supper, a meal shared by Jesus with his disciples the night before His crucifixion. Jewish tradition starts the Passover meal by offering a cup of wine, and later the breaking of bread. Jesus said the cup was His blood, and the unleavened bread was His body. Jesus ordered this to be repeated in “remembrance of Him.” Christians call this celebration the Lord’s Supper, Eucharist, or Communion. Pastor Tim Keller aptly refers to this as “the hors d’oeuvres of your future bliss,” because the Lord’s Supper foreshadows the final, most important feast.
We find that feast in Revelation 19:9, where John records, “And the angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb’”(NLT).
Some think this feast is metaphorical, to show how fulfilling Heaven will be, after the church, the bride of Christ, is united with her groom, Jesus. I believe this feast may well be literal. Like the one in Hook, it will be a sumptuous banquet with all manner of heavenly foods never seen before, with brilliant colors, tastes, and scents we’ve never experienced. Perhaps even manna will make an appearance.
And at the head of the table, God Incarnate, the risen Christ, will again sit with His people and share a meal. Minus the food fight, of course.
Are you prepared for the wedding supper of the Lamb?