This is simultaneously a meal of sacrifice and a meal of victory. Our muddled thinking prevents us from comprehending that humility and conquest can coincide. We imagine that it is either or. Either you are a meek and mild pushover, or else a warmongering tyrant.
The modern infatuation with equality wants to blur the lines of hierarchy. It wants perpetual victims, but it wants to obtain this by petulant tyrants. Equality, as currently comprehended, is the devil’s substitute for Christian charity. Instead of the generous love of a suffering King, freely given, it wants the obligatory taxation of a compliant populace, not given but taken.
The current project the cultural elites are trying carry out is an end to all rivalries by means of rivalry. It is trying to end injustice, through injustice. It is trying to build the kingdom of heaven, using the devils tools of envy, avarice, and vain ambition.
But Christ is King because Christ submitted. He was exalted on high to His rightful place, because He did not grasp at it His rightful place; He submitted to His Father, and so received from His Father the Name above all names. He became the lowest, and so became the highest.
As always, this feast of our Lord sets our thinking aright. The only way to live is to first die. The only way to the crown is through the cross. The only way to conquest is through sacrifice. Christ’s body and blood is set here before us, broken and bleeding. The victim and the feast. The lamb and the lion. The Suffering Servant and the Victorious King.
The Supper isn’t the blurring of all order and hierarchy, but is Christ’s demonstration of how to wield one’s office. Our God came down in the flesh, humbled Himself, and now He’s boss of everything. Those are the rules.
So come in faith and welcome to Jesus Christ…
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