FEAST BEFORE THE VICTORY
WE DON’T UNDERSTAND THANKSGIVING
This week, we embark on the greatest feast of our calendar year, a sprawling table groaning under the weight of roasted turkeys, buttery mashed potatoes, cranberry relishes, spiced pies, and casseroles engineered by grandmothers to overwhelm both stomach and soul. Families travel hundreds of miles to sit elbow-to-elbow, carving meat, pouring gravy, and piling plates as if abundance itself were our birthright. Yet for all its warmth, Thanksgiving often reveals how confused we are about the very meaning of feasting, because modern Americans instinctively believe that celebration belongs after the victory. We think joy is something earned rather than received—like when a basketball team devours a midnight banquet only after the championship, or when a political party books the hotel ballroom only after the final vote tally, or when a nation pours into the streets only after the last enemy surrenders. This is the pagan posture toward feasting: gratitude that waits for proof, celebration that demands certainty, joy that refuses to rise until the war is over. It is a view of life stripped of faith and emptied of hope, because it insists on seeing the victory before it will give thanks for it. It treats triumph as the end of the story instead of the beginning, turning the feast into a memorial of human success rather than a declaration of divine promise. And until we recover the biblical pattern—feasting before the deliverance, in the shadow of danger, with our confidence fixed not on circumstances but on God—we will continue mistaking Thanksgiving for nostalgia instead of the roaring, covenantal act of hope it was always meant to be.
UNDERSTANDING PLYMOUTH
If we want to recover that biblical pattern, we must return to the moments in history when God’s people actually practiced it. And there is no clearer American example than Plymouth. The men and women of 1621 understood something we have almost entirely forgotten—that feasting is not a reward for comfort but a weapon against despair. They knew that celebration does not wait for the war to be won but marches out to meet the victory long before it arrives. Their Thanksgiving was not nostalgia, nor was it an indulgent pause between hardships. It was a deliberate reenactment of a rhythm far older than America itself, the same rhythm that shaped Israel on the night of the Passover and Christ’s disciples in the upper room. To understand Thanksgiving, we must begin where America began—at a feast held in the shadow of death.
By the fall of 1621, the people at Plymouth Plantation had no earthly reason to celebrate. They had weathered one of the most harrowing winters in colonial history, losing more than half their company to cold, scurvy, infection, and starvation. The Mayflower’s cramped quarters had been a breeding ground for disease, the makeshift shelters scarcely held back the New England wind, and their meager supplies dwindled with every passing week. Bradford’s account makes clear that these were not hearty pioneers flourishing in a new world; these were gaunt survivors who often buried their dead at night lest nearby tribes notice how few remained. The women suffered the most, as nearly three-quarters of them perished before spring. The living were so weak they could hardly bury the dead, and many believed that the colony itself would be reduced to bones in the Massachusetts soil before the year ended.
And yet, by the mysterious kindness of God, their circumstances shifted just enough to breathe hope into their lungs. They recovered strength as the weather thawed, they planted corn with the miraculous guidance of Tisquantum—an English-speaking Patuxet whose presence was so unlikely that Bradford himself considered him a providential instrument—and they began to gather fish, shellfish, fowl, and small game. Their diet remained lean, their houses remained crude, and their survival remained precarious, yet by autumn they found themselves not starving, not dying, but standing upright in the land. It was not abundance, but it was mercy; it was not security, but it was sustenance; it was not triumph, but it was evidence that God had not brought them across the sea to forsake them. These settlers were not entrepreneurs chasing wealth or romantics chasing novelty. They were English Reformed believers who crossed the Atlantic because conscience demanded obedience to Christ above king, comfort, or crown. They were Puritans who expected the Christian faith to shape nations, order laws, discipline men, and raise children to the glory of Christ. Planting a colony was, for them, a covenantal act—a foothold of Christian civilization at the edge of a continent they hoped Christ would eventually claim.
When their governor called for a feast, the colony responded in ways that seem almost reckless to modern ears. Four men were sent to hunt and returned with enough fowl to supply the settlement for days. Ninety Wampanoag arrived, including Massasoit himself, bringing five deer to contribute to the meal. There were kettles of stewed venison, spit-roasted fowl, mussels baked on the beach stones, eels caught by hand from the brooks, porridge-like suppers of ground corn, and whatever ale could be coaxed out of their scant barley. Between meals, the men performed militia drills, the muskets cracking through the crisp New England air. It was not a festival of ease. It was a declaration of faith. They feasted in the presence of graves still soft with recent mourning. They feasted while uncertain of the coming winter. They feasted while acutely aware that their colony might still fail. And yet they feasted because biblically formed people do not wait for victory to begin their celebration. They celebrate because God rules, because Christ reigns, and because every act of gratitude is an act of protest against despair.
UNDERSTANDING BIBLICAL FEASTING
The Pilgrims were not inventing a new theological pattern; they were stepping into one of the oldest rhythms of God’s people. Israel’s first great feast—Passover—was not eaten after the victory. It was eaten in the crucible of fear, with Pharaoh breathing down their neck and the Red Sea still unmoved before them. The lamb was slaughtered while they were still slaves, its blood painted on their doorposts before a single chain had fallen from their wrists. They ate unleavened bread not because they had already escaped, but because they were preparing to flee in faith. They ate bitter herbs while their children slept under the shadow of an empire that had murdered countless Hebrew sons. Their feast was not a commemoration of victory; it was a declaration that victory was coming. The meal itself was an act of defiance against Egypt and a confession that the God of Abraham would keep His covenant even when their future looked impossible.
The same pattern emerges in the upper room when Christ instituted the Lord’s Supper. Jesus broke bread and poured wine not in the glow of resurrection triumph but in the gloom of looming betrayal. He handed the cup to men who would scatter within hours, to disciples who did not yet grasp the necessity of the cross, to followers whose faith was still fragile and dim. He sang a hymn while walking toward Gethsemane, knowing that the soldiers were sharpening their blades and that the powers of darkness were preparing their strike. The Lord’s Supper was, in the strictest sense, a feast before the victory. It was a meal eaten in the shadow of death, where Christ placed the symbols of His triumph into the hands of men who had not yet seen it. Where the world feasts after conquest, the church feasts before it, because our hope rests not in circumstances but in promises; not in visible success but in the God who writes history; not in the mood of the age but in the certainty of Christ’s resurrection and ascension.
This is why Christians throughout history have eaten joyfully in times that would make most men tremble. David set a table “in the presence of my enemies” because he knew the Shepherd’s rod would break the enemy’s jaw. Nehemiah commanded Israel to eat fat and drink sweet wine while Jerusalem still lay in ruins because he knew God was rebuilding the city through their hands. The early church broke bread in secret rooms while Rome hunted them, because they believed Christ’s dominion would outlast Caesar’s. The Reformers feasted under threat of stake and sword because they knew the Word of God would conquer the world. In every age, biblical feasting is the embodied confession that God will achieve victory even when nothing in the moment suggests it. It is faith that can smell the feast of the future even when surrounded by the smoke of battle.
WE FEAST BEFORE THE VICTORY
This is why Thanksgiving must not degenerate into nostalgia or seasonal sentimentality. Christians do not gather around the table to remember a vague feeling of Americana or to celebrate a nation at its height. We gather to proclaim that Christ reigns now, that His promises remain fixed, and that our present sorrows cannot eclipse the future He is bringing. America is not strong at the moment. Its institutions shake, its moral clarity has evaporated, its families stagger, and its culture thrashes about like a wounded animal. Yet precisely because the times are bleak, our feasting becomes a theological act of defiance. We do not wait for cultural victory to give thanks; we give thanks because Christ has secured the ultimate victory through His blood and because He is slowly but relentlessly bringing all nations under His feet. We do not wait for the darkness to retreat in order to rejoice; we rejoice because the Light already shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome Him. Our gratitude is not escapism. It is an act of war—a strike against despair, a refusal to believe the headlines, and a public declaration that the King of kings will finish the work He has begun.
When Christian families sit down at their tables—whether humble or abundant—they are standing in the footprints of thousands of years of believers who feasted before they saw the triumph with their eyes. As you carve the turkey or pass the bread, you are joining Israel eating lamb on the night of their escape, the disciples eating bread before the resurrection, and the Pilgrims eating venison beside fresh graves in the cold New England air. You are training your children not to feast because life feels easy but because Christ is faithful. You are declaring that the world belongs to Him and that He will continue to tame and bless the nations long after our generation is gone. You are confessing that though America trembles, Christ does not; though cultures shift, His throne remains; though decay spreads, His kingdom will advance until the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. And you are proclaiming—whether you fully feel it or not—that the future of Christ’s kingdom will be better than the present, because Christ Himself is guiding history toward restoration and glory.
When you gather at your table this Thanksgiving, you do not feast because we are living in the glory days of the republic. You feast because the King who carried eighty exhausted colonists through a deadly winter is the same King who will carry His church through every trial of our time. You feast because victory is assured, even if you will not live to see its fullest bloom. You feast because God has never failed to turn graves into gardens, ruins into cities, and small outposts of faith into civilizations shaped by His Word. In that sense, every Christian table is a declaration of loyalty to the future Christ is building. It is your family participating in the ancient pattern of God’s people who celebrate before the deliverance is visible, trusting that the God who brought them this far will not cease until all nations bow to the Son.
