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- We can have a foretaste of that future salvation now in prayer, in service to others, in the changes in our inner nature through the gospel, and through the healed relationships that Christ can give us now. But they are only a foretaste of what is to come. (Isa. 25:6-8)

- Jesus tells us that both the sensual way of the younger brother and the ethical way of the elder brother are spiritual dead ends. He also shows us there is another way: through him. And to enter that way and to live a life based on his salvation will bring us finally to the ultimate party and feast at the end of history.

- Dinesen is professing her belief that something exists beyond these two alternatives, something that is neither the selfishness of the "aesthetic" nor the severity of the "ethical." She couldn't find a better way of representing that something than a wonderful meal, a great feast.
- Jesus's parable answers the question that Dinesen's story poses so skillfully. Jesus says, "I am the bread of Heaven."

- Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher who influenced Isak Dinesen, called these two ways the "aesthetic" and the "ethical," and in his writings he shows that neither approach to life is adequate.
- But what is the alternative? At Babette's feast, the diners have the momentary mystical experience in which these two things--"righteousness and bliss" (Ps. 85)--meet.

…will you ever get to know him and grow into his likeness.
- Isak Dinesen's beloved story "Babette's Feast" also ends with a feast, and also teaches us about two common ways to live that are inadequate, and the reality of another path.
- Both the worldly life of sensual pleasure and the religious life of ethical strictness fail to give the human heart what it is seeking.

- Christians commonly say they want a relationship with Jesus, that they want to "get to know Jesus better." You will never be able to do that by yourself.
- You must be deeply involved in the church, in Christian community, with strong relationships of love and accountability. Only if you are part of a community of believers seeking to resemble, serve, and love Jesus...

4) Salvation Is Communal
- Feasting is communal by nature. No reunion, family gathering, wedding, or other significant social event is complete without a meal. When we invite someone to eat with us, it is an invitation to relax a bit and get to know one another.
- If it took a community know an individual (as C.S. Lewis testified), how much more would this be true of Jesus Christ?

…other hand, if Jesus really had done everything for you to secure your salvation, the you are not your own. You were bought with a price.
- If we say "I believe in Jesus" but it doesn't affect the way we live, the answer is not that now we need to add hard work to our faith so much as that we haven't truly understand or believed in Jesus at all.

…heart-change will be superficial and fleeting.
- The gospel is therefore not just the ABCs of the Christian life, but the A to Z of the Christian life. Our problems arise largely because we don't continually return to the gospel to work it in and live it out.
- Embracing the gospel is a double-edge sword. On the one hand it cut away slavish fear. God loves us freely, despite our flaws and failures. On the...

- What makes you faithful or generous is not just a redoubled effort to follow moral rules. Rather, all change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out of the changes that understanding creates in your heart.
- Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without...

…hope, significance, and security. We believe the gospel at one level, but at deeper levels we do not.
- We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. THat is how we grow.

- We must personally appropriate it, making it more and more central to everything we see, think, and feel. THat is how we grow spiritually in wisdom, love, joy, and peace.
- The basic operating principle of the gospel is "I am accepted by God throughout the work of Jesus Christ--therefore I obey."
- We habitually and instinctively look to other things besides God and his grace as our justification...

- Christianity is perhaps the most materialistic of the world's faith. Jesus's miracles were not so much violations of the natural order, but a restoration of the natural order (back to God's original creation).

3) Salvation Is Individual
- In order to survive and grow, individuals must eat and drink regularly. That's what we must do with the gospel of the grace of God.

- It is a sign that, for Jesus, this material world matters. This world is not simply a theater for individual conversion narratives, to be discarded at the end when we all go to heaven.
- No, the ultimate purpose of Jesus is not only individual salvation and pardon for sins but also the renewal of this world, the end of disease, poverty, violence, suffering, and death.

…between believing that God is gracious and tasting that God is gracious is as different as having a rational belief that honey is sweet and having the actual sense of its sweetness." (Jonathan Edwards: "A Divine and Supernatural Light")

2) Salvation Is Material
- A meal is a very physical experience: Lord's Supper and Wedding Supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19). What does it all mean?

- Salvation is not only objective and legal but also subjective and experiential. The Bible insists on using sensory language about salvation. It calls us to "taste and see" that the Lord is good, not only to agree and believe it.
- "There is a difference between believing that God is holy and gracious, and having a new sense on the heart of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. The difference...

There are four ways to experience a feast that correspond to the ways our lives will be shaped by Jesus's gospel message.

1) Salvation Is Experiential
- Why would Jesus, to convey what he had come to do, choose to perform a miracle of turning water into wine as a "sign" (John 2)?

The Feast of the Father

Jesus constantly depicts the salvation he brings as a feast (Matt. 8:11). He left a meal--what we today call the Lord's Supper or Eucharist--as a sign of his saving grace. And, of course, Jesus's parable of the lost sons ends in a party-feast that represents the great festival of God at the end of history.

At the end of the story of the prodigal sons, there is a feast of homecoming. So too at the end of the book of Revelation, at the end of history, there is a feast, the "marriage supper of the Lamb" (Rev. 19). The Lamb is Jesus, who was sacrificed for the sins of the world so that we could be pardoned and brought home. Jesus will make the world our perfect home again.

Therefore he did not come in strength but in weakness. He came and experienced the exile that we deserved. He was expelled from the presence of the Father, he was thrust into the darkness, the uttermost despair of spiritual alienation--in our place. He took upon himself the full curse of human rebellion, cosmic homelessness, so that we could be welcomed into our true home.

…the gate of the city, a powerful symbol of rejection by the community, of exile. And as he died he said, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46), a tremendous cry of spiritual dereliction and homelessness. What had happened? Jesus had not come to simply deliver one nation from political oppression, but to save all of us from sin, evil, and death itself. He came to bring the human race home.

Then Jesus appeared, and declared that he was bringing in "the kingdom of God" (Mark 1:15). The people crowded eagerly around to observe and hear him, but nothing about him fit their expectations. During his ministry he wandered, settling nowhere (Matt. 8:20). He remained completely outside the social networks of political and economic power. Finally, at the end of his life, he was crucified outside...

We may work hard to re-create the home that we have lost, but, says the Bible, it only exists in the presence of the heavenly father from which we have fled. This theme is played out again and again in the Bible. It is no coincidence that story after story contains the pattern of exile. The message of the Bible is that the human race is a band of exiles trying to come home. The parable is about every one of us.

We are told there that we were created to live in the garden of God. … There we were to adore and serve his infinite majesty, and to know, enjoy, and reflect his infinite beauty. That was our original home, the true country we were made for. After the exile from Eden, we long to make a difference in the world through our work, we experience endless frustration. We never fully realize our hopes and dreams.

There seems to be a sense in which we are all like the younger brother. We are all exiles, always longing for home. We are always traveling, never arriving. The houses and families we actually inhabit are only inns along the way, but they aren't home. Home continues to evade us. In the beginning of the book of Genesis we learn the reason why all people feel like exiles, like we aren't really home.

Redefining Hope

It is important to read Jesus's parable in Luke 15 in light of the Bible's sweeping theme of exile and homecoming--we will understand that Jesus has given us more than a moving account of individual redemption. He has retold the story of the whole human race, and promised nothing less than hope for the world.

The point of the parable is that forgiveness always involves a price--someone has to pay. There was no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself. One true elder brother paid our debt, on the cross, in our place.

But Jesus does not put a true elder brother in the story, one who is willing to pay any cost to seek and save that which is lost … By putting a flawed elder brother in the story, Jesus is inviting us to imagine and yearn for a true one. And we do have him!

While Act 1 of the parable showed us how free the father's forgiveness is, Act 2 gives us insight into its costliness. The younger brother's restoration was free to him, but it came at enormous cost to the elder brother. The father could not just forgive the younger son, somebody had to pay! The father could not reinstate him except at the expense of the elder brother. There was no other say.

The younger brother had gotten his one-third portion and it was completely gone. Now, when the father says to the older brother, "My son, everything I have is yours," he is telling the literal truth. Every penny that remained of the family estate belongs to the elder brother. Every robe, every ring, every fatted calf is his by right.