“THE ONLY POINT: THE FEAST”
Saint Luke 14: 16-24
2nd Sunday after Trinity: 10 June Anno Domini 2018
Father Jay Watson SSP
“Then said He unto him…” The Christ begins a parable by doing His essence. He speaks The very Word of God for He is (The “I Am”) Word of God. The “certain man” Whom the Lord refers to is His Father, to be sure, but it is also The Son Himself. “I Am in The Father and The Father in Me.” [Jn. 14.10] “For He Whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God.” [Jn. 3.34] “In the beginning was The Word and The Word was with God, and The Word was God.” [Jn. 1.1]
The Lord made a great supper and bade many. His first great supper was the bounty of the universe, the world, and all the fecund fruits of the garden. Oh, how many were “bade,” had your father Adam not fallen. And before the fall The creator and provider of all sustenance, “the goodest of good suppers,” was even then a servant of His guests for they were His children, He walked with Adam in the cool of the day. The perfect communion “cooked” by God was manifest in the all that was good in nature and Eden.
What was the first thing your parents did when the Supper of God wasn’t good enough, and they lusted for and ate the poison of “self?” They made excuses. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the old ancient enemy, Satan. In his excuse to blame The Lord, Adam was in fact calling the Lord’s good and perfect gift of Eve, poison. Adam’s shirking of God’s eternal supper invitation now manifested itself in his wholesale rejection of God. Now fear ruled. Before God the unrepentant sinner is naked and undone, fit only for the desert wilderness.
Christ is teaching that the only thing, ONLY THING, that matters, is the Supper, The Feast.
The “servants” are Jesus’ Patriarchs, Prophets, Priests, and Kings. His servants are the forgiven who bear, broadcast, and blanket His Word to all. They are Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, David, Elias, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist to name just a few of the myriads. Speaking of The Supper to come from The Hebrew vantage (the Old Testament scriptures) or of The Supper that is here from the Greek vantage (the New Testament), all of His servants likewise repeat His Word of free mercy and grace: “Come; for all things are now ready.” In Jesus’ Supper all things are ready and they are perfect.
What is the supper? It gives everything that’s needed. Is it the Gospel preached to aching and sorrowful hearts and ears, the cleansing of sin and sins in Holy absolution? Yes. Is it the pure, clean, eternally refreshing waters of Holy + Baptism, for no supper can be without accompanying drink? Yes. But quintessentially, the Supper of The Lords parable is The Great Supper of The Sacrament of The Altar—The Blessed and Holy Mass. What is The Word but The Word made Flesh. What is The Word but The Word preached, washed on, and eaten and drunk? What is the Word but Jesus Himself. His Word, His Body and Blood is The Supper of God for you because He is The Bread of Life, the true Mana from heaven. He is meal that flows from His Work of obedience, suffering, and death from Calvary’s stove, oven, roasting pit, and grill.
Like their fathers before them, and like all of you far too often, the villains of the parable also “with one consent began to make excuse.”
Rejecting God’s Supper for a piece of ground that “must needs go and see it.” And do you neglect The Sacrament and Preaching of repentance and believing for the mammon of the world, your flesh, and the devil? If dying on a tree in bloody and sweat and agony is not sufficient invitation to get your weekly attention and attendance, what would be? What real goods, what genuine worth does the devil offer you and your “buying power” and “doing quotient?”
Rejecting The Lord’s Supper for five yoke of oxen that have o be “proven,” tested, again, with your “own money” “bought,” is to turn your nose away from God’s Supper to root and snort around in a muck and mush of “The Law,” more self-effort, and moralism. The Pharisees then are the Pharisees now.
Rejecting Jesus’ Meal of Mercy because one has “married a wife” has zero to do with an actual Holy Wedding of Christian Bride and Groom, which typifies Christ’s union of One Flesh with The Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, but rather indicates that the man in the parable, and your “old Adam” as well, falls victim to constant straying, religious polygamy, spiritual adultery, and out-and-out syncretistic denial of the “one thing needful.” The one thing needful, the only thing, is not the catchphrase “Justification by Grace through Faith in Christ Alone.” No. That phrase was not nailed to the wood. That rule is not placed on your tongues. While that proposition is true and the article of faith upon which the Church rests, it is the content of that beautiful menu that feeds you—JESUS Himself, The Word, The Supper.
All of their excuses, and your excuses, are self-justifying, self-worshipping, self-working, filthy rags to be worn now in ignorance and to be worn for hell’s eternity in shame. The Law can only keep you away from The Table. The Law kills.
All are invited because Jesus wants, desires, all to be saved. His mercy is for all, but only received by the miserable, the repentant sinner. His atonement is universal. There is not one horrible thing you’ve done, or could do, that would ever cause Him to stop loving you, forgiving you, and seeking you to repent and believe—i.e. to receive His Supper.
To stay away from the feast, what does this mean? Those who don’t receive Holy Communion are damned? Well, yes, maybe, if the rejection is consciously and decidedly made. If one is ignorant through faithless shepherds and teachers, mayhaps not, the greater penalty inuring to the leader. The same with Holy Baptism. If rejecting The Lord’s Supper is part of rejecting Him and His presence—His Bodily Presence to forgive and feed—part of rejecting His Word, then the ones bidden but absent will be allowed to go their own way to perdition.
You too have been bidden this morning as you were bidden to The + Font as infants. Fed here the Forgiveness of Jesus you are brought with your fellow highwaymen, blind cripples, and poor beggars to the High Altar’s Wedding Feast Table. Christ is the real plower who breaks the hardened fields of your sinful heart. Christ is the real worker. Christ is the real sacrificial ox, though He be The Lamb of God. Christ has purchased you for Himself as the real Bride made One with Him the true Groom. Christ the Meal, the Server, The Host.
The only point: The Feast. The Supper.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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