Spectacle seems the right word for the scene. Overwhelm seems the right word for the feeling.
To taste and see and smell that we’re loved like that can change us. It can heal us. It can raise dead parts of us into new life. And it can make us into people whose lives and loves keep expanding just like these gospel stories do, until they include more and more of the world around us and more and more of the worlds within us.
Like Jesus, the fatted calf nourishes and sustains others. Like the Eucharist, the meat from the fatted calf becomes a little part of all who partake in it. The fatted calf reminds us of the self-giving love of Jesus.
This is a God who looks upon us and sees that we aren’t yet what we could be, we are not at full blossom, and so this God shows up not with an axe but with a shovel and a wheelbarrow full of mulch, patience, and hope.
We have Abram in a world in which things die and bleed and nourish one another. A world in which one being is sacrificed for the life of another all the time and everywhere. That world, not one cleaned up of its wildness and its gore, is where God is met. This Earth, not the heavens, is what God gives to all of us as a sacred gift.