One of the most important aspects of this Table is the guest list. The food on the Table is bread and wine. The Lord of the Table is the host, the one who set the Table, and who offered His body and blood in the heavenly places in a miraculous way, such that we could be knit together with Him by means of partaking in evangelical faith. The Holy Spirit ushers us into the presence of God as we partake of this meal, and He is the one who is accomplishing the great sanctification, performed throughout the course of human history. By this means, the blemishes and wrinkles are being removed from the bride, so that by the last day, she will be fit to be escorted down the aisle to the Son of God.
But part of this sanctification means learning another important aspect of the Supper—the guest list. We don’t mind the bread and wine. We don’t mind being invited to be friends of God. Misunderstanding what God is up to, we take to it readily.
We do mind some of the other riff raff that apparently think they were invited too. We think the Lord’s Supper is a black tie affair (with the black tie symbolic of whatever it is that makes us want to make this an exclusive event).
But eating with riff raff is one of the central things that God intends to teach us. We think that we have high standards when all we really have are petty standards. The Lord said that we were to scatter the invitations to this meal everywhere. Through mail slots, under windshield wiper blades, stuffed in shopping bags. This is a come one, come all sort of thing. The RSVP is our baptism, where we engage to come.
There is a winnowing, but the Lord does that. Some turn away from the gospel as proclaimed in the bread and wine. We can’t help that, and shouldn’t want to. We sometimes feel bad that we do not invite the lowly to some of our meals. But do we think the Lord is a hypocrite, and would not follow His own instructions?