In the Old Testament, one of the things that we learn about meals is that they draw boundaries. They define the limit between who is in and who is out. This is the first, the rudimentary lesson. The New Testament does not set this lesson aside but rather builds on it. The New Testament does not erase these boundaries, but rather expands them. The Table of the Lord is what it always was—the dividing line between the saints and the infidels. But now that the Spirit has been poured out at Pentecost, we have been instructed to take this bread to the world. We do not do this because the boundary line between holiness and unholiness has been made blurry, but rather because holiness is in the process of conquering the world. Holiness is expanding—but there is always a boundary. Until the last day, there will always be a frontier.
As we celebrate this meal, this means we have to make a sharp distinction between the holiness of God in its imperial phase, and the holiness of God surrendering to the tenets of worldliness. The former is the truth; the latter is a lie. The expansion of God’s ways into the world is not intended to dilute those ways. The growth of the kingdom does not spread it thinner. The more we break this bread, the more of it there is. We offer this to the world—but we are not offering less and less of it as we go. We are not going to run out. We break the loaves, and as we are passing it out in the back rows of the multitudes of all the earth, we will discover that we end with more than we started with. So, come. This is a Table of plenty. Come, and welcome.
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