Thought for the Week: The heavenly banquet
Philip Allum looks at who comes to the party
In the entrance to St James’s Church in Piccadilly are some words of welcome: ‘Our community is widely representative of partnered and single people, straight, gay and transgendered, those who have a sure Christian faith and those who struggle with belief… We believe that in the gospel is to be found a radical welcome, a great and generous invitation to share in the banquet of God’s creation.’ This struck me very profoundly and has been with me for some weeks.
St James’s has a unique ministry to the people of London; whether they are the men in suits queuing to buy lunch from the array of international food stalls in the courtyard on a Monday, curious foreign visitors or the homeless people sleeping on the pews overnight. In addition to a red hot Thai curry, which literally brought tears to my eyes, and a pancake, we took in a free concert of renaissance church music.
I believe very much in a creator God (and, perhaps more to the point, I hope he believes in me). And I like the idea that the whole of creation is one huge hymn of praise to the Creator, where every part of it that does just what’s required of it is in honour and tribute to its Creator. The sparrow that does exactly what is required of a sparrow or the sperm whale that does exactly what is required of a sperm whale is a verse in that great hymn of praise.
In Luke 14:12-24, Jesus uses a parable to liken the Kingdom of God, his own kingdom-movement – creation in all its fullness – to a banquet. A householder pays for and prepares a lavish celebration of food and drink, but the obviously ‘well-to-do’ intended guests come up with an imaginative assortment of excuses as to why they can’t come. The angry host then orders his servants to bring in ‘…the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame’. In the Methodist Church of my childhood, now some fifty years ago, the words of the communion service (then called ‘the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’) were along the lines that the bread and wine were ‘a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for us’.
The intended guests in the Kingdom of God – the chosen people of Israel, the self-righteous priests, the scribes and the Pharisees (those who would ultimately plot to destroy Jesus) – had waited and waited for the kingdom but were too busy with their religious politics and minutiae of the law to recognise the invitation when it arrived. The sort of people Jesus surrounded himself with – prostitutes, tax-gatherers, simple uneducated fishermen – were under no illusions about themselves. They accepted the invitation. There are also echoes of the parable of the seed and soils in which various things cause most of the seed to remain unfruitful. The original guests had ruled themselves out, and others had come in to take their place.
George Fox and the early Friends, with their message that ‘Christ has come to teach his people himself’, surely heard the invitation to the banquet. Fox claimed that he had got under the flaming sword back into a state of paradise where creation even took on another smell. We often think of George Fox and the other early Friends as being rather po-faced and serious, but they saw the heavenly banquet set before them and rejoiced in it. As someone pointed out to me recently, Jesus turned water into wine – not the other way round.
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