What would a feast look like for a lamb?
In a world at peace, we might imagine fertile fields, abundant grass, clear water, and nothing to fear. The lamb eats and rests. There is enough for everyone.
But put that lamb among wolves, and the meaning of the feast changes. There is still a feast. The wolves are eating.
The lamb is the meal.
This is the uncomfortable reversal we need to consider when we speak about the Feast of the Lamb. Christians commonly describe it as the final, joyful union of Christ and his people. I have no objection to that heavenly fulfilment. My question concerns what this union means while we are still here.
What does joining the Lamb look like in a world that devours lambs?
Jesus gave us an answer through his life. He spent himself in service. He fed people, healed them, received the unwanted, and continued giving when giving brought hostility upon him. He also sent his disciples into the world as sheep among wolves (Matthew 10:16).
The heavenly union has an earthly form. Here, joining the Lamb means entering his self-giving life. In a world of wolves, that participation can be bloody.
We cannot understand the invitation if we imagine only the celebration after everything is over.
Consider the wedding banquet in Matthew 22:1–14. A king prepares a wedding for his son and calls the invited guests. They refuse. He sends further messengers. Some guests go back to their farms and businesses. Others mistreat and kill the servants. Eventually, the king sends his servants into the streets to gather whoever they find.
We have heard this story so often that we can overlook how strange it is.
A royal wedding is ordinarily an occasion people want to attend. It offers excellent food, distinguished company, public recognition, and proximity to power. For people concerned with social standing, an invitation is itself a prize.
Think of James II’s coronation banquet at Westminster Hall in 1685. Peers, peeresses, bishops, barons, judges, and royal councillors occupied the tables. The privileged attended and were served. This is the familiar arrangement: places of honour belong to those already possessing honour.
Now imagine Jesus describing such an occasion and saying that the invited guests find other things to do. The king has to fill his hall with people from the streets.
Why would they behave like that?
The strangeness should make us listen more closely. We have also heard Jesus teach that greatness means serving. We have watched him give himself to people who can offer him no social advantage. We have heard him summon others to follow him.
Put these things together.
What sort of banquet does this Son invite us to join?
An earthly ruler can offer his guests an evening of privilege. Jesus calls people into the life he himself lives. Fellowship with him involves sharing his service, his vulnerability, and his willingness to bear the cost of love.
Suddenly, the refusals become familiar.
We readily make time for occasions that advance us. We become much busier when someone needs something that will cost us. There is a business to attend to, a household to preserve, a reputation to protect. We may even resent the person who brings the invitation, because the invitation exposes what we are unwilling to give.
We can praise Jesus’ sacrifice while carefully arranging our lives to avoid participating in it.
We can look forward to being united with him forever while repeatedly declining the earthly form of that union.
This is especially searching wherever religion offers positions of honour. A pope, bishop, preacher, or religious leader may be accustomed to receiving attention, protection, and service. But the Son’s invitation calls that person into giving those things to others. An honoured religious position cannot answer the invitation on its occupant’s behalf.
The same applies to everyone who claims the name of Jesus. We have to ask what happens when the service we celebrate begins to demand something from us.
The Feast of the Lamb on Earth is the inverse of what people ordinarily seek in a feast. The Lamb gives himself. Those who join him enter that giving.
At the Last Supper, Jesus made the connection painfully concrete. He presided over a meal and identified its bread and cup with his body given and his blood poured out (Luke 22:19–20). The meal expressed his self-giving. His companions were gathered around someone who was giving himself for them.
To belong with that Lamb has consequences.
Some of those consequences are literal persecution and death. Others unfold through years of costly care: feeding someone from resources we wanted to keep, standing beside someone whose exclusion protects our standing, forgiving when retaliation would satisfy us, or remaining faithful to a person whose needs have become exhausting.
Such love spends a life. Sometimes it sheds blood.
The suffering comes from the conditions under which love acts. The wolves’ appetite belongs to the brokenness of this world. The Lamb’s faithfulness belongs to the life of heaven already being lived within it.
This brings us to the wedding garment.
Matthew does not describe its colour or fabric. But read beside the Son’s life, the garment raises a question that reaches far beyond ceremonial appearance: have we come prepared to participate in what this wedding means?
Someone may arrive expecting recognition as an honoured guest. He has accepted the religious identity, learned its language, and anticipated its rewards. Yet he has kept himself untouched by the demands of the life he claims to share.
In earthly terms, his clothes may look perfect.
Within the inversion we are considering, their perfection becomes an accusation. He has dressed for privilege at the wedding of the self-giving Son.
Friend, where is your participation? Where has this love cost you anything?
The image of clothes stained with one’s own sacrificial blood expresses the seriousness of that question. A person can celebrate the Lamb’s wounds while refusing every invitation through which love might wound his own protected life.
And what about the white garments in Revelation?
Revelation describes robes made white in the Lamb’s blood, and the bride’s linen represents the righteous deeds of the saints (Revelation 7:14; 19:8). We see the garment in its heavenly appearance. But that appearance must not make us forget the earthly passage through which it comes.
The washing is a bloody image.
What appears white in the heavenly fulfilment may have appeared terrible while it was happening here: a body broken, a life spent, a faithful person rejected, someone continuing to love while others take advantage of that love.
The white garment is seen after the ordeal. Its brightness does not turn the ordeal into a pleasant experience.
We must therefore resist imagining that heavenly purity means having remained safely untouched on Earth. The garment can bear witness to a life given away.
This also helps us hear the invitation into the streets. The feast opens to people outside the circle of established importance. The servants gather both good and bad. The invitation reaches people without the credentials that normally secure an honoured place.
They, too, are called into participation. Neither pedigree nor a troubled past settles the response in advance.
The decisive question concerns the life we are willing to enter.
We may call the Feast of the Lamb joyful because we look toward its fulfilment. But we are being invited while we are still here, where lambs encounter wolves and self-giving meets the appetite of others.
Here, the feast has blood in it. Here, the Lamb is being consumed.
And here, he calls us to join him.
The entrance to the heavenly wedding stands within our earthly lives. We approach it whenever the invitation to love becomes concrete, costly, and inconvenient.
We can keep explaining how much we admire the Lamb.
Or we can accept his invitation.