John’s presentation of the Pierced One as Feast is not merely a fascinating example of the Christocentric hermeneutic through which the apostolic mind reads Scripture, it is also a direct answer to the soul-hunger of the human race—to your soul’s hunger and mine. 

Humanity is Hungry

Food is the first gift explicitly given by God to humanity (Gen. 1:29). In this way, Scripture depicts the human pair (and all who would come from them) as fundamentally “hungry beings.”^[1] Indeed, before any curse or sinful lack, hunger—and the food to satisfy it—is the gracious gift of God to His image-bearers, constituting them as those whose life and fullness must be received into themselves from the outside.^[2] Like all creation, the gift of hunger and of food was originally a means for humanity’s priestly communion with God in the temple-garden of the infant creation,^[3] but, with the fall, this gift was turned in on itself.

By hunger’s grasping desire (“…the tree was to be desired…” Gen. 3:6), insatiable soul hunger became the lot of our race, and by feasting on false food (“…she took of its fruit and ate…” Gen. 3:6), the True Food was removed forever beyond our reach. Thus, driven from the presence of God—for whom all hunger ultimately exists—mankind entered its life of death torn by a hunger deeper than their flesh, a hunger the perishing food of the thorn-cursed fields could never satisfy (Gen. 3:18-19; Isa. 55:2; John. 6:27).

With this God-hunger before our eyes (and, if we are honest, in our own souls), I want to consider how the Scripture uses the fundamental image of a meal to depict the final healing of our Edenic wound. We will turn first to Isaiah’s vision of an end-time feast at which Death itself is devoured before moving to John’s Gospel where the Isaianic meal, from which seraphic tongues would not dare to eat, finds its unimaginable consummation.

Glimpses of an Eschatological Feast

Given the essential role played by food in the human experience—both in the foundational texts mentioned above, and in the physical and spiritual life of Israel throughout Scripture—it is not surprising that the hope of final redemption would find expression as an eschatological banquet over which YHWH Himself presides and by which the mortal wound of humanity (imaged as the primal experience of hunger) is at last healed.^[4] One of the clearest visions of this festal hope appears in Isaiah 25:6-9:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And He will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces…It will be said in that day, “Behold, this is our God…This is the LORD; we have waited for Him; let us be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”

In these verses, the Spirit interweaves hunger and hope, picturing the final redemption of mankind as an eschatological banquet. A few points are worth noting here.

First, see the implicit association of hunger and death: as the people feast (that is to say, as their hunger is satisfied), death is swallowed up forever. To satisfy oneself at this table is to enter into a life without death.

Second, notice the striking parallelism between the experience of “the peoples” and that of YHWH: while the people feast on the rich food and well-aged wine that YHWH has provided, YHWH himself feasts on death, “swallowing up” forever the cursed veil spread over the nations.^[5] Haunting glimmers of an unthinkable substitution flit across Isaiah’s vision of eschatological joy.

Finally, the result of the feast is the revelation of God. On that day—namely, the day in which God’s people satiate their ancient hunger at His table even as He swallows up their death forever—on that day, it will be said, “Behold, this is our God…this is YHWH.” The One True God will be climactically revealed in the fullness of His personal identity at the table where His people’s soul-hunger is satisfied and their damning death devoured.^[6]

Delighting in Rich Food

In Isaiah 55:1-3, the prophet returns to the imagery of the eschatological feast. Here, however, we find a further development that radically deepens the weight and wonder of the vision:

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live…

In an echo of Isaiah 25:6, YHWH invites His people to “delight [themselves] in rich food” at the banquet table of His everlasting salvation. So far, we are on familiar ground. But then, in v.3, we see the radical turn. The invitation to come eat good and rich food becomes an invitation to come to YHWH Himself. Thus, the parallelism of the text indicates that the God of Israel is Himself the feast prepared and offered to His own.^[7] Staggering as it may seem, the prophet envisions a day when the high and lifted up Lord of Isaiah 6 will—in some as-yet-veiled manner—give himself as the food and drink for which humanity has hungered since the Garden.^[8] The exalted throne around which the seraphim veil their faces in awe will become the eschatological table around which the redeemed will gather in joy.

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