Seasonal Festivals

When I was about six, I was struck down with an illness that put me in the hospital for months. After recovery, this bug came back a second time and two of my three doctors gave up, supposing that I would die. They put me in the last room at the end of the hallway, a single room with no view of other people across the way or anyone walking past on their way elsewhere.

As a result, and perhaps because of natural temperament, I like being by myself and do my best work alone. While I don’t mind having people around, and enjoy working with others, I am seldom lonely.

However, I’ve learned that it’s impossible to maintain my spiritual life in a vacuum. If I practice the personal spiritual disciplines of Bible reading, prayer, confession, even praise, I’ll be okay for a little while, but something inside me starts to wither unless I am involved in corporate worship. I need the Body of Christ. Like a finger or toe cut from my physical body, I cannot maintain a robust spiritual health without other Christians.

This day I’m reading about the seasonal festivals practiced by God’s people in the Old Testament. They were occasions to praise the LORD for His provision in their lives and to remember all He had done for them throughout their history. These festivals pointed ahead to God’s plan of redemption fulfilled in the promised Messiah, and then to that final gathering of the righteous at the end of the age. On all these occasions, the people celebrated together.

In the spring, they celebrated their deliverance from bondage in Egypt with Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, then the Feast of Firstfruits. In these celebrations, they remembered the meal of unleavened bread after they escaped, and the blood sprinkled on their doorways so the angel of death would pass over their homes. They also rejoiced over the bounty of God, thanking Him for the first harvest in spring, and anticipating the harvest to come. These were dramatic rituals, rich in meaning and glorious, particularly when the nation had a revival and were turning back to God in faith and repentance.

Today Christians celebrate our deliverance from the bondage of sin in Holy Communion, an ordinance established by Jesus Christ which He also connected to Passover. Together we eat unleavened bread to remind us of His Body broken for us, and together drink wine or red juice to remind us of His blood spilled at the cross to cover our sin.

This celebration also reminds us that we must come with clean hearts, our sins confessed. 1 Corinthians 5:7-8 says, “. . . For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

The Firstfruits part of the celebration is fulfilled also in Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:20 says, “But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

Jesus rose from the dead, but there is a greater harvest to come in the final resurrection. Verses 21-23 say, “For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. But each one in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, afterward those who are Christ’s at His coming.”

We celebrate this reality both at Communion and Easter Sunday, but today my focus is on that word, communion. This cannot happen in a solitary fashion. I could commune with the Lord by myself, yet the pronouns of the Bible are seldom singular. Almost every command and instruction, including these about celebrating what the Lord has done, are plural.

For those who are outgoing and more gregarious than I, likely this is a given. For me, it is another spiritual discipline. Yet it does not carry with it the connotations ‘discipline’ suggests. My natural being may like being alone, but when it comes to praising God and remembering what He has done, there is no celebration like rejoicing with others over what the Lord has done, is doing, and has promised to do.