On the Lost Art of Feasting

Though I have no scientific data to support this premise, I imagine that when most of us think of deep and truly pious faith, our heads are flooded with images of “ascetic” people; people who, perhaps, wear baggy jeans that fit loosely around waists made thin through countless days and weeks spent fasting. I imagine that when most of us ponder what it means to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, we start to turn a little long in the face and sad in the eyes, because we’ve somehow convinced ourselves (or been convinced by others) that to fully love God requires us to utterly deny and forsake any form or shadow of pleasure in this currently decaying world. Our minds whisper to us, “Faith and life in Jesus is only genuine if it is marked by total misery and deprivation.”

What is exponentially frustrating about this line of thinking, is that it is informed only by partial-truth. Fasting and self-denial do have a place in the Christian faith (Mark 2:20, Matthew 16:24), but even then they are not a bitter end to themselves; Christians deny themselves for the sake of laying hold of a greater treasure that they could not otherwise possess. “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25, emphasis mine).

But to say that the Christian life ought to be solely characterized by a dour unhappiness and a pronounced lack of any delight is a grave misunderstanding of Scripture - and thus, a grave misunderstanding of God. 

The Embodied Joy of Feasting

Consider, for example, just one of the ways that God calls his people to a visceral, embodied joy throughout the Bible: feasting. As God’s people walk the dusty and hard road of faith, he calls them to celebrate feasts and festivals as a way to both remember the glorious things he has already done to work salvation, and to anticipate what he will one day do to usher in salvation totally - for both the cursed creation, and for the people he calls his own (Exodus 23:14-15, 1 Corinthians 11:26). 

Sharing in a feast with others is not typically a sundry, somber experience. Feasts are known for plates full of rich and generous helpings of food, the sound of glasses filled with refreshing drinks chiming together, and the contagious joy of laughter and smiles. In a feast, we are given a wondrous opportunity to pause and give thanks for the bounteous blessings and gifts given to us by physically enjoying the taste of the food, the refreshment of the drink, and the wonder of laughter. It seems altogether fitting that God himself should call his people to feast together, and that he should choose the language of feasting to show us what it means to know him and love him: “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him” (Psalm 34:8). 

So yes, of course God calls us to times of fasting, but he also calls us to times of feasting.

The Blueprints for Feasting

Passover is probably the most well-known of Israel’s feasts - and for good reason. Not only is Passover the first of the major feasts we find in Scripture, it is also a sort of blueprint for what feasting means in particular for God’s people - indeed, the feast of Passover waves its hand and points us beyond itself to something better, something even more beautiful and feast-worthy.

We read of the first Passover in Exodus 12. The Israelites gathered together with their families, prepared bitter herbs and bread without yeast and young lambs, ate their meal in haste, and then painted the doorposts of their homes with the lamb’s blood. That night, God passed over the homes where the Passover was eaten, and destroyed Egypt’s firstborn. Pharoah immediately sent the Israelites away, and thus God delivered the nation from their centuries-long slavery. In the years to come, the feast of Passover was to be observed as a memorial to the incredible way God rescued his people - a celebration of, and rejoicing in, God’s decisive work in history (Exodus 12:26-27).

It is absolutely no coincidence that Jesus’ death on the cross took place on the heels of sharing in the Passover with his twelve disciples (Luke 22:14-15). The feast of Passover was always leading to this, to the moment when God would once again work decisively in a single historic moment, marked not by the blood of any ordinary lamb but by the blood of the Lamb of God himself (John 1:29), to rescue his people not from bondage to a merely physical slavemaster but from bondage to the false gods, cosmic powers, and sin that would separate them from God forever (Colossians 2:15, 1 Peter 3:18).

How fitting, then, that Christ should also give us a feast, by which we remember his death and anticipate his return - what we in the church today call The Lord’s Supper, or Communion. We find once again that God does not leave us with only abstract, invisible truths to believe in. Jesus breaks and gives us bread as a symbol of his body, broken for us; he offers up thanks as he shares the cup, a symbol of his blood, shed for us (Luke 22:19-20, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26). We do not commemorate Christ’s work with vague and foggy thoughts; we commemorate his work in concrete words and in the physical consumption of the bread and the cup. We remember him and anticipate his return in an embodied way. We get it into our gut. We hold it. We taste it. And in doing so, we remind ourselves that our salvation is just as sure and real as the holding and the tasting, and just as much a gift as any feast is - a celebration of unfathomable grace. 

Feasting to Make a Difference

Christ’s death and resurrection changes everything - including how we feast! Indeed, because of Jesus, we are invited to what will be the greatest feast the universe has ever known: the wedding supper of the Lamb, where people of every ethnicity, tribe, nation, and language will sit together and share in the bountiful harvest of God’s kingdom fully come on earth as it is in heaven (Revelation 5:9-10, 19:9). 

We would do well, it seems, to remember that as we feast together. God has invited us into a royal banquet when we had no merit of our own for being there. As we literally and physically set our tables and open our homes with hospitable hearts, we can invite a poor and starving world into a feast, not only of wonderful food and refreshing drink, but of the soul-nourishing grace and kindness laid out by a gracious God who welcomes the outcast, forgives the sinner, and brings all who delight in his Son into an unshakable kingdom. Through our feasting, we might show even those who hate us what it means to taste and see that the Lord is good and what it feels like to find a refuge and home in him, as our ancient brothers and sisters commonly did (Acts 2:46-47). 

Let us feast together with such hope, mouths and hearts overflowing with the bread of life, sharing in God’s gifts with all who would come.