Feasting on Hope
I’ve made the case that the gospel-centered movement needs a shot of confessional sacramentology if it wants to be refreshed and missionally potent in the coming years. My focus has been on the spiritual reality of participating in Christ with the sacraments, but especially when it comes to the Lord’s Supper, the rubber meeting the road in the life of the church is being able to articulate how Jesus meets us at the table. Pastorally you can hammer the point all day long that in the Supper you truly feed on Christ, but what that means for the regular Christian who comes to the Table can sometimes feel vague.
My friend Hannah King has written the most wonderful book addressing just this. Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness is part memoir, part pastoral theology about what it means for God to feed his people with Jesus at the Table. Not that she is short on good theology, but her focus in the book is what it means for us to receive Jesus. Not the doctrinal question — but what does it mean to meet Christ?
Sometimes as pastors we forget that meeting with Jesus is the goal; communion with Christ is the means by which we have fellowship with God and enjoy him forever. Jesus met many different people during his earthly ministry. But when Zacchaeus, the widow of Nain, Anna and Simeon, Levi, Jairus, and all the others met him, yes, they were meeting with the God-man, the eternal Word incarnate, with all the redemptive implications of his ministry. But they encountered the person of Jesus, who met them with compassion and specificity because he saw them in their need. When Mary stumbled into Jesus in the garden on Easter morning, her called her by name, addressing her griefs, fears, loneliness, and loss in that single greeting. It was the voice of the gospel speaking compassionate hope and belonging through the darkness. We need to get the doctrine and proclamation of the resurrection right, yet gospel proclamation must lead people to encounter Jesus as he calls us by name.
How is Christ present at the Lord’s Supper? In what way do we feed on him there? Critical questions, but the aim of the Table is to meet with Jesus. Hannah does the church an immense service to show that when it comes the Supper frequency is quality because it is frequently meeting with Jesus. And what does Jesus do for us? As pastors in the Reformed tradition (Hannah’s Anglican, but I’m gonna count her as one of ours), we often emphasize the spiritual presence of Jesus, the true feeding on him by faith that occurs at the Table. True, profound, necessary, but those things are just the mechanics; Hannah shows how at the Table Jesus meet us in our griefs, fears, loneliness, and loss and so much more. She’s able to do this because she demonstrates, just as was true when people encountered Christ in his earthly ministry, at the Table we still encounter him in his heavenly ministry.
One of the biggest takeaways I received from Hannah is that I need to add greater diversity in the imagery I employ when I explain the meaning of Lord’s Supper and invite people to receive it. The Lord’s Supper is the sign and seal of the new covenant, of the gospel, and is a picture of Christ himself. The breadth of how God in Christ meets his people is the breadth with which we should talk about the sacrament, because the Supper is about Jesus. The Lord’s Supper is a wonderful gift so that we may meet and know Jesus better and be reminded that he knows us and call us by name. Hannah does a marvelous job reminding us of that.
