"An Odd Wedding Feast"
Isaiah 25:6-9
October 12, 2008
In the O.T. text for today, the Lord is running the
verbs, He’s doing the action. And the action that
He’s doing is threefold: He’s preparing a feast,
He’s swallowing up death, and He’s wiping away tears.
The ones He’s doing these things for is “all
peoples,” “all nations,” and “all
faces.” The result of His doing these things to them is
that they confess Him as their God and rejoice in His salvation.
And that is the outline of today’s sermon: What the Lord
does, for whom He does what He does, and how those on the receiving end
of the Lord’s doing respond.
We must always begin with what the Lord does.
Without the Lord’s doing, nothing would get done. We would
not exist in the first place, without the Lord having done the verb of
creating. We can only do anything as a result of the Lord having
given us life. Furthermore, we can only love and serve the Lord,
because the Lord first did the verbs of loving and serving us in
Christ. It’s when we try to do the verbs on our own, apart
from the Lord and disconnected to His doing, that we get ourselves into
trouble. When we insist on doing things ourselves, we become our
own gods, we undo the Lord’s doing, and that gets us death.
In contrast to the feasting, life, and rejoicing that comes from the
Lord’s doing, our doing brings us famine, death, and tears.
So, we must begin with the Lord and what He does. When He’s
running the verbs, feasting, life, and rejoicing is the result.
The first verb He does here is to throw a
feast. Feasting is the opposite of famine. There’s
two kinds of famine - the lack of earthly bread is one kind, but the
more dangerous kind of famine is the lack of the heavenly bread of
God’s Word. The lack of earthly bread only leads to
physical death, something that comes upon all of us sooner or later as
the wages of our sin. But a bigger death results from the lack of
heavenly bread, and that is separation from God for all eternity in
hell. Hell is the place where the verbs that God is doing are
verbs of punishment, condemnation, wrath, and judgment. In want
of the bread of God’s Word as we are from birth (because we are
sinners from birth), we enter into this world in a state of
famine. Without the Lord doing something about this, we would
suffer not only the little, physical death, but the greater, big death
of hell.
But today’s text tells us that God has done
something about this spiritual famine. He’s brought it to
an end with a great feast that He provides for us. Isaiah
describes this feast. It’s a feast where there’s rich
food and well-aged wine. It’s food that’s full of
marrow and wine that’s well refined. In other words, this
is the best food and wine you could possibly have. When the Lord
throws a party, He doesn’t just give you a little, nor does He
put out the cheap stuff. He gives you the best, and He gives
until your cup overflows.
But this is no ordinary, earthly food. It is
the spiritual, heavenly food of His Word and the true physical body and
blood of Jesus given us to eat and drink in the feast of the
Lord’s Supper, a foretaste of the feast to come in heaven.
Christ’s body is the rich food full of marrow and His blood the
aged wine well refined that God is giving you to feast on at this Table
here and now. Isaiah lets us know where the Lord is throwing this
feast: “On this mountain,” he says. Which
mountain? Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Well, just as there are
two kinds of food - the earthly and the heavenly - so there are two
kinds of Mt. Zion’s. The earthly one in Israel is the one
on which the city of Jerusalem and the temple were built. The
temple was the place where the Lord was giving His people the heavenly
food of His Word. Every time His people came to worship at the
temple, they would enjoy the feast He provided for them there.
But we’re not in Israel. We’re a long way from that
Mt. Zion. Where do we partake of this feast? There’s
another Mt. Zion - the Church of Jesus Christ. This is no
physical mountain located miles away, but it is a reference to all
believers in Christ. It’s on this mountain, among the
people of God, wherever they are gathered together in His Name, that
God provides this rich feast for them to enjoy.
And that’s something that we must remember abouBackt
this meal, that God is the one who provides this rich feast for
us. It’s His party; He is the one throwing it; we are but
guests. The host is Jesus, at whose expense this feast comes to
us. He has made it possible by way of His death and
resurrection. Without His doing on Mt. Calvary, there would be no
doing on Mt. Zion. It’s only because Jesus has made all the
preparations for the feast for us and provided Himself as the food,
that we are now invited to come and eat of His feast. Because we
are neither the hosts of this feast, nor are we the ones who’ve
provided it, we don’t get to run it the way we want to run
it. It’s not ours to do, but the Lord’s to do the way
He wants to do it. In addition, the Gospel lesson for today
teaches us that we can’t come to this feast improperly
attired. We must be washed and dressed by the Lord. We must
be baptized and clothed with Christ and His righteousness before we can
come to His banquet. We come on the host’s terms, not ours.
Providing a rich feast for us, then, is the first
thing mentioned here that the Lord does for us. The second thing
the Lord does which Isaiah mentions here is the swallowing up of
death. Here, too, there are two kinds of death that have occurred
as the result of our insisting on doing things our own way - physical
death and spiritual death, or the little death and the big death.
But in Jesus Christ, God has swallowed up both of them.
He’s taken care of physical death by overcoming it with His
bodily resurrection. He’s taken care of spiritual death by
forgiving us our sins and reconciling us to God with His blood shed at
Calvary. We now have life through faith in Him. Though we
can’t see it now with our eyes, we have spiritual life, according
to the Lord’s promise, “Whoever believes in the Son has
eternal life.” The verb is in the present tense: you
have eternal life right now through faith in Christ. And though
we still experience physical death, we will not remain in the grave but
be raised from the dead just as our Lord was according to His promise,
“Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and
everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.”
Physical death for the Christian is but a sleep, from which the Lord
will awaken you on the Last Day. Death can no longer harm
you. The sting of death has been removed. It can no longer
separate you from God’s love for you in Jesus Christ. That
which formerly had the power to swallow you up has itself been
swallowed up by your crucified and resurrected Lord, the death of death.
It’s on the day of our own resurrection, when
our Lord returns for us, that He will do the third action mentioned
here by Isaiah - the wiping away of tears and the removing of the
reproach of His people. Now is the time for crying. We cry
when we lose a loved one in death. We cry when we are reproached
by the world for confessing Christ. We cry when we suffer under
the weight of the cross. We also cry over our sins in repentance,
bemoaning the fact that we are still wretched sinners. But the
Lord is going to bring all of this to an end upon His return. On
that you have His Word. Here He takes an oath and stamps His
promise with His Name, saying, “the LORD has spoken.”
And what the Lord speaks, He will do. So, though we continue to
cry and mourn in this life, the Lord’s promise will keep us from
falling into despair. He tells us that we belong to Him, that we
will feast with Him in heaven some day, that we will be raised from the
dead and live and reign with Him for all eternity, and that our tears
will be wiped away by Him when He comes back for us.
These promises are for everyone. Isaiah states
here clearly that God does these verbs for all peoples, for all
nations, for all faces. And yet Jesus says, “Many are
called, but few are chosen.” This doesn’t mean that
God only wants some to enjoy His feast, that He only wants some to have
eternal life, or that He wants to wipe away the tears of some.
Why, then, will not all be on the receiving end of these verbs?
It’s not that God excludes them, but that they exclude
themselves. They hear promises like these spoken to them in
God’s Word, but they reject them. They hear God’s
call to repentance and faith, but they refuse to confess themselves
sinners and trust in Jesus for forgiveness. They are the ones
represented by the people in today’s parable who are invited to
the feast, but make excuses not to come. They are the ones
represented by the man who tried to come to the feast in his own
clothes. These people reject the way God has provided for them to
come to His feast and insist on coming on their own terms. But
the Lord throws such people out. The only way one is
“chosen” to attend the Lord’s banquet is if he comes
on the Lord’s terms, confessing his sin, trusting in His
crucified and risen Savior, Jesus Christ, having been clothed with Him
and His righteousness in holy Baptism.
It is these people who then do some verbs of their
own, but only after they have been done to by the Lord. Our doing
is only in response to and only possible on account of the Lord’s
doing. Our doing is confessing God as our God and rejoicing in
His salvation. We can only confess God as our God, because He has
made Himself our God. We can only rejoice in His salvation,
because He saved us. We are not our own gods nor did we save
ourselves. It was in His Son, Jesus Christ, that God both made
Himself our God and saved us. He did this 2,000 years ago when He
sent His Son in the flesh to give His life on the cross as the
sacrifice for the sins of the world. And He did this to you
personally when He baptized you into Christ, spoke His Word to you, and
worked repentance and faith in your heart. It was in your Baptism
that what Jesus did for the world was delivered to you
individually. It was at your Baptism that God gave Himself to you
as your God and made you His child. But the delivery of the
Lord’s gifts didn’t stop with your Baptism. God
continues to deliver Jesus and His salvation to you through the Word
and the Lord’s Supper.
Here today God continues to remind you that He is
your God and that you are His people, purchased with the blood of His
Son. And because you belong to Him, you get to be on the
receiving end of His doing. You get to feast with Him here and
now, and you get to look forward to the feast with Him to come in
heaven. You get to see death swallowed up in the death and
resurrection of Jesus, and you get to hear God’s words of life
and salvation spoken to you for His sake. You get to be comforted
in the face of all the suffering that you experience in this life with
the promise that God will one day wipe away all your tears and take you
to be with Himself in heaven. See Him today through His words and
His works for you in Jesus Christ. “Behold, this is our
God; we have waited for Him, that He might save us. This is the
LORD; we have waited for Him; let us be glad and rejoice in His
salvation.” Amen.