Peter Wu, Jeffrey Wall, Marcus Reese, Tompson Lee,
Yeon Gyoung Ko, Paul Keller, Rob Barrett

A meal is about food – a basic human need. But a meal is so much more than food. A meal is food plus people plus the God who made both the food and the people. He also designed their need to eat – and their need to eat together. A meal is a holy place and time where life is renewed, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Blessed are the ones who bless the place and time by preparing the meal.

When we prepare a meal, we provide nourishment for others, or maybe just ourselves. Either way, it is an act of caring for valuable people. The meal may be for family, friends, strangers, the poor or the infirm. When we prepare a meal we voice our desire for this one to live another day.

But preparing a meal is much more than simply performing periodic maintenance on a human body. It tangibly loves another person as body and soul. The recipients of a meal receive concrete love by being invited to the meal, by receiving a chosen the menu based on their tastes and aversions, and sitting in a thoughtfully appropriate setting. The meal preparers have expended time planning, shopping, chopping and baking. They have sacrificed money to buy the ingredients. They have emulated God’s creative work by converting a meaningless array of raw material into a true meal. There is fellowship between preparer and recipient even if they never meet. The act of preparing can also be fellowship itself, as two or more people pool their resources to produce the meal. After all of this, the result is a meal, an invitation to pause and feed your body with food and your soul with fellowship.

The world both understands and confuses the preparation of meals. There is currently a wide interest in creative cooking with personalities such as Martha Stewart in the lead. There are myriad cooking shows, cooking books, kitchen stores, and the availability of diverse ingredients in our stores and millions of recipes on the Web. But the world cuts corners on the transcendence of meals, inching back toward simple feeding. The advertisements proclaim: "You, too, can enjoy vitality and energy, low weight, a heightened immune system, delayed aging, healthy gums, and a lower risk for cancer by eating properly!" But isn’t eating properly more than just choosing the right food? In some ways, seeing prepared foods in the grocery deli section is encouraging because we are offered the chance to prepare a real meal while minimizing some of the time and effort needed. But in the end the world misses out on true table fellowship between people and with God.

The Bible is filled with meals and their preparation. God initiated it all by preparing miraculous meals for His people in Eden (Gn 1:29-30), by manna in the wilderness (Ex 16:4-16), through ravens for his prophet (1 Ki 17:1-6), and he even "prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies" (Ps 23:5). These meals provide sustenance, but they also demonstrate God’s love and concretely offer fellowship. God’s meals have symbolic power to communicate transcendent truths, culminating ultimately in the carefully prepared Passover feast (Ex 12).

Jesus’ ministry was filled with meals that both fed and spoke loudly about fellowship. He proclaimed his fellowship with tax collectors by eating meals they prepared for him (Lk 5:27-32). He taught a parable that reached a climax with a father’s preparation of a celebratory feast for the first lost son, while the second lost son spurned his father’s fellowship meal. Jesus "eagerly desired" to share his last supper with his disciples so that he could declare them to be his friends and share his heart with them (Lk 22:15-16; Jn 13-17). And after his resurrection, Jesus restored Peter by cooking some fish and likewise telling him to "Feed my lambs" (Jn 21:9-19). Later, Jesus’ followers gathered around meals (Ac 2:42). And the pinnacle of the gospel was when the barrier wall between Jews and Gentiles was broken down by those willing to prepare a common meal for both (Ac 11:1-18).

But some have sought to deceive through false fellowship at meals. Adam and Eve ate God’s meal in Eden while spurning God (Gn 3:6). Rebekah prepared a counterfeit meal for Isaac while Jacob deceptively presented himself as Esau, violating Isaac’s fellowship (Gn 27:1-40). Pharisees prepared meals for Jesus desiring not to feed him but to kill him (Lk 14:1-24). And Peter tried to reconstruct the wall between Jews and Gentiles by breaking table fellowship (Ga 2:11-13).

Finally, all of history looks forward to the glorious table fellowship of God with all of his people (Rev 19:9). Creation envisioned it. Salvation restored our hope for it. Passover and the Lord’s Supper pre-commemorate it. Jesus lived and died for it. When he went to the cross he not only went to "prepare a place" for us (Jn 14:2), but also to prepare a meal!

So what does this mean for us today? It means that the routine boiling of noodles is not mundane. It is a vote for life to go on for one more day. True human life with bodies, hearts and minds must be continually nurtured by meals. It also means that even the least of us can serve Jesus by serving the least of them with anything from a cup of cold water to a lavish feast.