433. The Recreations Related to Goodwill Are Lunches, Dinners, and Parties
As we all know, social lunches and dinners are customary everywhere. They are planned for various reasons. For many people they serve to build friendship or promote family togetherness; they serve for enjoyment, for fundraising, and for showing gratitude. They are also a corrupting influence used for persuading people to join some faction. Those in power use them to build their own reputations. Courts of monarchs use them to put on a magnificent display.
The only lunches and dinners that relate to goodwill, however, are those that involve people who love each other because they share a common faith. In early times, Christians used to have social lunches and dinners for exactly this purpose. Called feasts, they were instituted to lift and unite Christians' hearts and spirits. The dinners they held stood for the associations and connections people formed when the church was first being established, because the evening when the dinners would occur has that meaning. The lunches they held, however, stood for people coming together in the second phase of the church's establishment, because that is what morning and daytime mean.
While they were at the table, they would have conversations on various subjects - both domestic and civic issues. In particular, they would discuss topics related to the church. Because the events were feasts of goodwill, the conversations would entail goodwill and its forms of joy and happiness. The spiritual atmosphere that prevailed during these feasts was an atmosphere of love for the Lord and for their neighbor. This atmosphere would lift their individual minds, soften their tones of voice, and allow a celebratory feeling from deep in their hearts to fill their senses.
We all have a spiritual atmosphere that emanates from the feelings derived from our love, and from the thinking prompted by those feelings. This atmosphere deeply affects other people, especially during feasts. It emanates from people's faces and their breathing.
The fact that lunches and dinners, or feasts, stood for such meetings of the mind is the reason they are named so many times in the Word. In the spiritual meaning this is exactly what these meals stood for. In the supreme sense this is what the Passover dinner among the children of Israel stood for; the same is true of the banquets during other Jewish festivals, as well as the meals from the sacrifices next to the tabernacle. In those instances, the bond between people was represented by breaking bread and sharing it, and by drinking from the same cup, which people passed around among them.
