The Hospitable Leader DevotionalSample

The Old Testament people, the people looking forward to Christ’s coming, were always looking toward the eternal messianic feast. They were waiting for the Messiah to come and make everything right, which they symbolically likened to a “feast.” However, because the Messiah had yet to come, some approached the time before Christ’s appearance as a “fast.” John the Baptist, the prophetic predecessor to Jesus, famously lived a life in the wilderness and fasted as a means of showing his groans to God in anticipation of the coming Messiah.

This is why, when Jesus and his followers were extravagantly feasting, the Jews condemned them for impropriety. They were feasting when the Jews thought they should be fasting. However, as Christ points out, they were missing the point: The Messiah had come, and his feast had come too. The feast reflected the coming of God’s kingdom. As The Hospitable Leader says, there’s a “thinness” between the kingdom of God and the world when we feast. Just as when Christ feasted it was a sign of his kingdom on earth, so we can feast as a sign of the presence of the divine.

Because we are between the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ, when he will make all things right, we both fast and feast. We fast, awaiting the fullness of Christ to manifest on earth, and we feast in thankfulness that he has come, that he is here, and that he will eventually be here fully.

Though we can sometimes fall into the habit of being overly serious, or perhaps overly concerned with our current tasks at hand, we must remember to celebrate the good things, even if we haven’t accomplished all we want to accomplish. When we do this, we create joyous environments where we celebrate our participation in the feast of God.