Feast – Sunday, March 09, 1997
In times of privation and hunger, all people dream of feasts of tables piled with fruits and game of rich sauces and warm bread. Perhaps This is why metaphors of hunger and feasting are so frequently applied to spiritual matters. Those who “hunger and thirst after righteousness”1 are blessed; at the same time, we are urged to “feast upon the words of Christ.”2 As George Bernard Shaw put it: “No nation… can live without public-houses in which to seek refreshment… In the church alone can our need be truly met, so that the soul may open all its avenues of life to the holy air of… truth.”3 We must eat to sustain life and so God reminds us that we must similarly partake of his inspired words to sustain our spiritual lives.
A rebellious young man was being counseled by his minister. In anger and frustration, the young man threw down a copy of the Holy scriptures and shouted: “What is this? What is this book you keep forcing on me? What is this?” The minister quietly picked up the scriptures and replied, “My son, the children of Israel had precisely the same question for Moses. They woke up one morning and they saw the ground covered with something small unknown, small round things white as the morning snow. And they said to Moses, “What is This? What is this thing? And Moses said to them what I say to you now: “This is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.”4
We live today in a time of spiritual famine. Although the food of life has never been more abundant or more available, the world feeds us junk food, fills our hearts and souls with images and ideas that offer no true sustenance. The banquet the world has spread before us may have the illusion of plenty, but we need the true feast God has prepared, the bread of life, that will leave us hungry no more.5
1 New Testament, Matthew 5:6.
2 Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 32:3.
3 George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Religion, ed. Warren Sylvester Smith (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1967), p. 24.
4 Old Testament, Exodus 16:15.
5 New Testament, John 6:35.
March 09, 1997
Broadcast Number 3,525