The Banquet. Ronald James Mahler

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      To my sister Linda, who has always had food on the table,

      room around it, and a house filled with love

      for anyone who enters.

      A Chair

      —Ronald j. Mahler

      Tables’ mantling unequalled fair

      Their settings sprawling, remarkable

      Upright and wanting, is a single, vacant chair

      Its placement among rows of the thankful

      In a room majestic and perceptively endless

      Voices meld together in wonderful flight

      Love, like a prism, magnified and tremendous

      Embodied in the One who sits in perfect light

      Curtains rise, exposing a Banquet Divine

      Dishes plentiful and elevating appetites

      Senses delight in working overtime

      Yet a single chair remains, void of its invite.

      “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock.

      If anyone hears my voice and opens the door,

      I will come in and eat with that person,

      and they with me.”

      —Jesus Christ

      (Revelation 3:20)

      _________ Introduction _________

      People are naturally curious about the afterlife. During our childhood years, many of us are taught that there is a blissful place that “good” people go to after they die: heaven. However, many of our cultural conceptions about the reality of heaven and how one gets there are either askew of the Bible’s teaching or estranged from it.

      Many parables of Jesus Christ underscore the reality of hell while highlighting how one can avoid going there or how one can enter the kingdom of God and experience its heavenly rewards for eternity. Jesus’s parable of the great banquet—a foreshadowing of what the Bible refers to as the marriage feast of the Lamb—addresses this all-important subject with sobriety.

      In the parable (Luke 14:15–24), the Lord relays how a servant is sent by his wealthy and benevolent master to tell those he has already invited to a celebratory feast that the banquet is now ready. Incredibly, everyone who has been invited doesn’t actually want to attend. Their decision infuriates the goodly master, and so he directs his servant to invite others outside of the privileged crowd the master had at the top of his invitation list. The servant obeys, and the doors of the banquet are held open for people whom the initial invitees wouldn’t think to invite to their own feasts and banquets. So heartbroken and angered is the master as a result of the initial invitees’ ungrateful attitude towards his kindness that he declares that none of this crowd will be permitted to snatch even a morsel from the bounty of his banquet’s table.

      As we’ll see, the parable of the great banquet’s characters indeed have “real-life” identities attached to them, just as the parable’s punchline points to the eternal rewards in heaven that await those who believe in the Son of God, as contrasted with the equally eternal (yet tragic) consequences that accompany others’ unbelief and ultimate rejection of God’s Son. The parable invites the reader to contemplate its narrative as motivation for one to do everything necessary in order to get on this banquet’s list of invitees!

      By all biblical accounts, this event will be unlike anything we could possibly experience in the here and now. Imagine walking into an elaborately decorated regal hall resembling the length of countless football fields buttressed together. Imagine how overwhelmed you feel as your eye scans an enormous exhibition of faces, voices, ethnic groups, colours, and excitement. You are speechless because no words can fill in the blanks of what you could never have known about heaven. It’s impossible to process all you can see or to appreciate the layers of lavish fare that extend throughout and adorn the space’s hemispheric sightlines.

      Such are the optical titillations inherent within the biblical imagery of God uniting around His heavenly banquet table with all the redeemed of every age and of every racial background, language, social status, and nation the world has known. In “the New Jerusalem,” the house of God and the family of faith are joined together in what Matthew Henry referred to as “a reception for repentant sinners.”