As we look at this Table, we see humble fare. What God has set before us here is simple—it is bread for food, and wine for drink. What could be simpler? There is little that could be done to make it a humbler meal.
It is designed this way—humble fare for humble wayfarers. The apostle Paul teaches that we not only eat this food, we are this food. We are one body, one loaf. The bread represents the body of Christ, which body we are. The wine embodies the blood of Christ, by which blood we are cleansed and brought into fellowship with one another. There are many rich applications, but this is one of them. Humble fare for humble wayfarers.
The Puritan Thomas Brooks once said that faith was the champion of grace, and that love was the nurse of grace. But humility, he said, was the beauty of grace.
Humility is the foundation of all honor. The only way that resurrection honor can be straight and true is if the foundation of humility is straight and true. And Scripture teaches plainly that humility comes before honor (Prov. 15:33; Prov. 18:12; Prov. 22:4). Some want to by-pass the cross—that everlasting testimony of ultimate humility—in order to go straight to the honors. But no cross, no crown. Others want a false, perpetual humility, a demeanor that refuses to be raised into glory, honor, and dominion. But how is rebellion against the purposes of God in any way humble?
So we sit down at this meal as peasants, and we rise from it as princes. We are washed before we come, but we are nonetheless seated in the full realization that we do not deserve to be here. We still remember what we were like before the cleansing. So when we are seated here in true humility, that seating is beautiful. When we are raised from our place at this Table, that raising is glorious.
So come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.