Year of Biblical Literacy: The Symbols of Christ (The Meal)
Notes
Transcript
John 6:48-58
The Symbols of Christ
The Meal
Introduction: Good morning, If this is your first time joining us - Welcome.
Last week we began a four part series leading up to Easter Sunday. We
are looking at the Symbols of Christ, seen in the water, the meal, the cross,
and the grave.
As I mentioned last week - Symbols may not have a whole lot of cultural
relevance to us but the Bible is filled with metaphor and imagery,
symbolism and signs. YHWH is a rock. The name of YHWH is a strong
tower; the righteous run into it and are saved…Those who hope in YHWH
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint…..Jesus said, I am the vine, you are the
branches.. Whoever abides in me bears much fruit..
C.S. Lewis, in one of his essays, talked about how God did not look
around the world finding ways to relate to us but has actually made the
world in such a way so as to relate to us.
God - through these metaphors, symbols, signs and word pictures wants
to change the way we look at the world - he wants to speak to us through
the scripture of course, but also to speak the truths of scripture seen in the
world around us.. he wants us to hear his word all around us; to think and
see as the Biblical writers do - when you look at the skies - whether night
or day - The Psalmist says, - The heavens proclaim the glory of God and
the earth shows his artistry..
That is the world that the Biblical writers lived in - a world alive with the
presence of God - a world shouting to us about his glory and his presence
among us...
It’s a beautiful and mysterious thing that God gave us these physical
things to relate to us by and to minister to our souls with - he’s calling to
us through them - they are prophetic whispers telling us about our God his story, his promises to us, to bring deeper understanding and
connection to his story, and to incite deeper trust, deeper hope and
deeper love. This is what Poetry does right? and specifically what the
Psalms and Prophets do - they don’t simply tell us about God, but they
tells us in such a way - They paint a picture, tell a story - that we might
have a personally experience with God ourselves.
I believe that God wants to speak to us in the ordinary, everyday imagery
and symbols all around us, because the ordinary is where real life is
happening. He wants to use his creation, and our daily rhythms in it to
bring about spiritual formation.
“The kind of Spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life
are quiet, repetitive and ordinary” - Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the
Ordinary
This morning I want to change the way you think about eating and
drinking, as we consider the Meal.
1. A Meal
1. Obviously a meal (both eating and drinking) is something that is
absolutely essential to life - something so common that we often
don’t even think about it having any deep meaning or significance.
Maybe you grew up in a home were everyone would fend for
themselves for meals, scattered throughout the house, differing and
conflicting schedules, so that you rarely sat down for a meal
together and communed or connected in any significant way.
Maybe if you did have a family meal it still felt more like school lunch
than a family tradition or a sacred moment. And for others of you
the table was a place to connect and be family, to talk through deep
and personal things.
2. In our culture today people seem to generally use food in two ways
- either as a necessary evil - you have to eat to stay alive - food is
fuel - so it doesn’t really matter what you put in your body just scarf
it down so you can get on to the important stuff. OR we have turned
eating into an end in itself - a kind of decadent epicurean feast
where it is all about tantalizing the senses - trying to quench an
insatiable hunger and an insatiable thirst - My wife, Grace, made a
comment about this the other day - we are constantly trying to find
more flavor, new taste and new experience, it never ends…My wife
often has to remind me - this doesn’t have to be the most perfect
meal. You will eat again.
1. The problem with both of these views is they they miss the deep
meaning and significance behind the sacredness of meal.
3. In the ancient near east, a meal was never just a meal - a time to
simply ingest food and quench thirst, or just about debaucherous
feasting - A meal was about kinship and friendship. It was about
hospitality. It celebrated covenant and promise. It is significant in
scripture that the first meal ever mentioned being prepared and
eaten is a meal between Abraham and YHWH (Genesis 18:3-8)
1. In the Near East culture, “Meals themselves - the food served, the
manner in which it was done and by whom - carried socially
significant, coded communication. The more formal the meal, the
more loaded with messages. The messages had to do with honor,
social rank in the family and community, belonging, purity and
holiness. Among God’s chosen people Israel - Meals became
ways of experiencing and enjoying God’s presence and
provision.” - The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery
2. The Meal
1. In the Bible, people ate meals just like we do, but even at the meals
God’s presence was expected, awaited, and enjoyed. All meals
were sacred because YHWH had provided them. Meals were also
used as memorials. There were social meals like weddings, and
harvest parties and then there were the national meals and festivals
that were given to Israel as a way to commemorate their national
identity and story - Of course this is the way we see it introduced
into the nation of Israel - into their cultural Identity. It is significant
that before God gives the nation of Israel any laws, commands, etc,
He gives them a yearly meal, an act, to remember his presence,
provision, and salvation - The Passover meal…
2. God gives Israel one of the most common, earthy, human ways to
remember their story - a meal.
3. In Exodus 13:8 God tells Moses that this meal is about
remembering - in the Bible, a call to remember—especially when
tied to a covenant sign or ceremony—is a vibrant, powerful, and
participatory concept where people recalibrate their lives according
to what's being remembered.
4. God says, When you sit down to eat this meal, and your children
ask - What does this mean? Tell them - "it is because of what the
Lord did for me". This meal is to be a liturgical act of telling
themselves, and their family, the story of God and finding their own
story, and identity in it. - “what he did for me”. I love that, God
makes it so personal.
1. It reminds me of Psalm 107:2-3, “Let the redeemed of the Lord
tell their story - those he redeemed from the hand of the foe,
those he gathered from the lands, from east and west, from
north and south.”
5. This Passover meal in particular becomes an incredible memorial to
train Israel not to forget where they came from, their salvation from
slavery, who their God is, and who they are in light of his rescue,
and their new freedom under him… - It becomes the story that they
tell.
3. The Eschatological Meal - The Kingdom Meal
1. There developed around the time of the prophets a vision for a final
meal - a Meal in the Kingdom of Heaven. - not just a spiritual meal,
or some esoteric experience - The understanding was that just like
the passover celebrated the Exodus - there would be a meal in the
new age - with all nations joining in to commemorate the final
Exodus - The final victory of God, his judgment of the nations and
the restoration of all things.
1. “On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of
rich food for all peoples a banquet of aged wine—the best of
meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain he will
destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that
covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The
Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will
remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. The Lord has
spoken.” - Isaiah 25:6-7
2. And as time went on the idea of being an honored guest at this
meal began to develop. Remember I said, a meal wasn’t just
food to be eaten but intimacy to be shared, a sign of honor and
deep friendship. - Oh to be a friend of YHWH and to sit at his
table. We get pictures of this honor and intimacy behind a meal
in the Bible - David, bringing Jonathan’s son, Mephibosheth to
his own table to eat all the days of his life. An act of honoring
someone and sharing deep intimacy and friendship together.
3. This Kingdom Feast is mentioned in the Gospels. Jesus
challenges the common understanding of the day that it is the
Jews who are deep intimate friends of YHWH and will be at this
Kingdom meal
1. (Luke 14:15-23 READ ALOUD)
1. So who gets to be at this meal, Who gets to sit at God’s
table - who gets the deep intimacy, friendship and
hospitality of God?
4. The Last Meal
1. Now once again, Jesus comes on the scene and radically
reinterprets the meaning of the meal and shows what it is, and what
it always pointed to.
2. Many of us are familiar with the Eucharist, or Communion - the
bread and the cup - that Jesus instituted at The Last Meal as a
Christian sacrament. Jesus, while he and his disciples are
celebrating the Passover together, takes the unleavened bread and
breaks it telling his disciples to eat it - because this is a symbol of
his body that will be broken for them. Likewise Jesus takes a cup of
wine and passes it around the table telling each of them to drink of
it - it is a symbol of his blood that will be poured out for the sins of
many - this is the ratification of the New Covenant. And he says, DO
THIS in remembrance of me…
3. I love how in the gospel of Luke it records that Jesus said, with
fervent desire have I desired to eat THIS meal with you before I
suffer. And then Jesus goes on to explain the significance of THIS
last meal - Particularly the bread and the cup. They symbolize him
and his life giving sacrifice for the world. It is THIS Meal - the bread
and the cup and what they signify that will bring an unprecedented
intimacy and friendship with God. Jesus fervently desires to be with
his people - to abide with them, in close friendship and intimacy.
1. “The sacraments are not a second way of salvation; they are
simply Jesus’ one way of salvation scaled down, physicalized,
individualized, simplified, and concretized, from hearts to hands,
from soul to body, from group to individual. He knew that we
need not only spiritual things but also physical things in order to
grasp him more easily, to “come” to him more specifically.” Frederick Bruner, The Gospel of John
1. And this is what Communion or Eucharist is really about: it is
the word becoming flesh again and again. It is the most earthy
way that the heavenly Lord wants to be with us. It is about
communing with our Lord
2. Jesus talks extensively of this in John 6:53-56 - Jesus said to
them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son
of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever
eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will
raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my
blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my
blood remains in me, and I in them.”
3. This Eucharistic Meal is Jesus’ offer of permanent, ongoing,
friendship. He invites us to dine often at his table, and to eat this
meal with him. An act of permanent ongoing association and
identity with him - making our home with him and he with us.
4. Through this meal and what it symbolizes - the tearing of Jesus
flesh (the breaking of the bread); the shedding of his blood
(symbolized in the cup), the judgment of God will fall on Jesus
himself - the lamb of God, and the judgment will Passover his
people and the way to God’s presence will cleared. As we said last
week, Jesus sacrifice is what makes way for the Spirit to come
upon humanity. The Spirit will be given - he will abide with us and us
with him…And in an unprecedented way we will experience the
presence and provision of God - his hospitality. It’s what the prophet
Jeremiah foretold - “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and
with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made
with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them
out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a
husband to them,” declares the Lord. “This is the covenant I will
make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the
Lord.“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will
they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the
Lord, because they will all know me, from the least of them to
the greatest, declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their
wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” -Jeremiah
31:31-34
5. This meal therefore is not to be taken hastily, it is not to be taken
casually, it is not to be scarfed down, but to be savored, it’s to be
taken in a worthy manner, as Paul says, as we reflect on God's
invitation of intimate friendship and hospitality that he offers us
through this meal - through the life, death and resurrection of his
Son.
1. “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in
me, and I in him.” Jesus tells us that this is the way to settle into
our home with him; by regularly dining at his table. Our weekly
gatherings around God’s word and the table of the Lord should be
like weekly homecomings.
1. The Lord’s table, this meal, is a weekly offer to reorient our
lives around the person and mission of Jesus to live in him and
him in us. To enjoy deep friendship and intimacy with God. We
join him in that by trusting in his death for us - that it paid for
our sin, cleansed us from unrighteousness, and also by
continuing his mission- displaying the kingdom life through our
lives, until he comes again.
2. The Meal is the opportunity or invitation to trust/ believe (in a
physical way) by weekly reorienting our lives around him,
making him the center of our universe, making him our home,
making him and his mission our sole identity.
1. “The Lord’s Supper is a repeated Altar Call to ongoing
conversion, to fresh recommitments and entrustments of
oneself to the Lord Jesus Christ, The Bread of Life.” Bruner, The Gospel of John
5. Eat and Savor this Meal
1. Use this meal as a Liturgy.
2. “The kind of Spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the
Christian life are quiet, repetitive and ordinary” - Tish Harrison
Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary
3. Church, what if we slowed down and began to use these physical
acts, and rhythms of our lives, as ways to connect and reconnect to
God. What if you used a meal each day as an opportunity to
recalibrate your body, soul and spirit to the Lord. Like the Israelites Use it to tell one another your passover story. Tell what the Lord did
for you. What an incredible memorial to train us not to forget the
goodness and kindness of the Lord in saving us. To remember we
also were slaves to sin, but now we are freed to God.
1. What if we began to use The MEAL as a reminder, not only of our
sin being atoned for, but of God’s desire to be our intimate friend,
and for us to make our home in him, to settle into him, to find all
our delight, our hope, our comfort, and peace, our desires in him.
4. Use this meal to bring you home to commune with the Father, to
delight in the Son, and walk in the Spirit...