While I relish the family feasts that accompany the church's holy days, such as the one coming at Easter, I almost enjoy more the leftovers of those days than the feast itself. The abundance of the feasts make for good eating for some days to come. Leftovers can be very enjoyable. In some narrowly circumscribed ways, the Church is feasting on leftovers in the Supper of the Lord. God had prepared the banqueting table for His Old Testament people. He had His servants, the prophets, invite them to the readied feast. But those who called themselves His people would not come. They preferred to gnaw on the bones of their own putrid righteousness. They preferred to remain in the stinking squalor of their own homes and farmsteads. They preferred the home cooking of self justification. The Lord's Day manna they hoarded for themselves was wormy and decaying, but they desired it more than trusting that God would rightly feed them at the right time. The Lord was left with the abundance of "a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined" (Is 25:6). He had leftovers galore!

We, who had no right to the feast, who were not among the chosen, who had not been invited from of old, now were compelled to come: "The feast is ready! Come, to the feast; greatest and least!" They may be leftovers from the Old Testament, but they always make great eating. Thus we approach the Communion Table with the understanding that we are grafted in by the gracious invitation of the Lord, who sent the prophets of the New Testament; the apostles, to proclaim the universal invitation to the festal board. We have come to a feast not prepared for us, but for others, but they would not come! How shocked and grieved we are by their refusal of the Father's gracious invitation. In that shock we should again experience that enormous relief and joy at being brought to the feast to eat the abundant remains of their neglect. Likewise, it warns us not to neglect the Table which the Lord has set for us in the New Testament of His blood. We may not return to business as usual once we have eaten. We may not check out our property, or delight in our new car, or lounge with the wife of our youth (Lk 14:18-20), so that we decline the invitation of our Lord.