After Everybody Has Gone To Bed

At eleven at night the house finally stops making noise, and Deborah puts one lamp on over the counter and eats.

Not a meal exactly. Half a bowl of pasta that went cold on the hob at seven, two slices of toast, whatever fruit has not gone soft. She eats standing up with her hip against the drawer handle, and for about twenty minutes nothing in the world wants anything from her.

She would not tell anybody this, but it is the best part of her day.

And that is precisely why it also sits slightly wrong. Because in her head, a proper meal has people at it. A proper meal has a table with the chairs pulled out and somebody saying pass that, and hers has a worktop, a dish towel over the tap, and the fridge clicking on and off behind her. So she has quietly filed her eleven o'clock as not really eating. A gap. Something she does to keep going, rather than something she is doing.

You know this kitchen. Maybe yours is at half past ten, or at four in the morning before a shift. Maybe there is no one else in the house at all and the quiet is not a relief but a whole climate. Whatever the shape of it, you know what it is to eat in a way you would not describe to anybody as having dinner.

So let me take you up a mountain, because there is a meal there that no one ever tells you about, and once you have seen it you will not read your own counter the same way.

Seventy elders climb a mountain with two brothers and a young man. They have just heard terms read out loud, and blood has been put on an altar and sprinkled toward the people, which in that world meant the thing was now unbreakable. They go up expecting the worst, because everyone in that camp believes that seeing God is the end of a person.

They get to the top, and there is something under His feet like a pavement of sapphire stone, clear as the sky itself.

And nothing happens to them. Nobody is struck. And then the sentence that ought to stop us in our tracks: they beheld God, and they ate and drank.

That is how the covenant was ratified. Not with a handshake and not with a document. With a meal. Men sitting down and chewing food in front of the God they expected to kill them, and going home afterwards, and the eating was not a break from the ceremony. The eating was the ceremony.

The meal was the signature

We miss this because we treat eating as the thing that happens around the important part. In that world it was the important part. To sit and eat with someone was to say, in public and in a way that could not be taken back, that there was peace between you and that you belonged to the same table.

That is why the meal came at the end of the covenant and not before it. It was the signature. Nobody ate with a party they were still in dispute with.

You have been eating at a covenant table at eleven at night and calling it a gap in your evening. Exodus 24:11 has them beholding God and eating and drinking on the same line, and the Holy Spirit is not confined to a mountain or a dining room, He is at that counter with you while the fridge clicks on and off.

And notice who was there and who was not. Seventy elders, and one young assistant, and two brothers. No wives, no children, no household. That meal was not a family occasion in the way we mean it. It was a covenant meal, and it counted because of who they were eating in front of, not because of how many chairs were filled.

House to house, at whatever hour the house went quiet

Now come forward a long way, into the first weeks after everything changed.

And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.Acts 2:46

Read the ordinary words in that sentence. Bread. House. Meat, which just meant food. Daily. This is not a description of a service. This is a description of people eating in kitchens.

They had a temple and they used it, and then they went home and ate, and the eating at home is written down with exactly the same weight as the temple. Gladness. Singleness of heart. Somebody's ordinary plate at somebody's ordinary hour.

You have a place at that, and you were given it long before anybody thought to lay a second setting for you. It is written into the very texture of Acts 2:46, and the Spirit of God who filled that first crowd is the same One filling a small kitchen with one lamp on, which is a room He has never once described as second best.

What this is not going to do to you

Let me be clear about two things, because people get bruised right here.

This is not an article about what happens at a communion rail. It is not going to tell you what any church's table means, or who may come to it, or what you should have done at the last one you went to. That is not my business and it is not what your eleven o'clock needs.

And this is not a promise that the chairs fill up. Whether the house gets fuller, and when, is His to decide. I will not stand here and predict your Christmas.

What I am telling you is what is already true at the counter tonight. A covenant has terms, and here they are, plainly: His side is that a place was made and the meal was ratified and the invitation stands whether the house is loud or silent. Your side is not to become a household. Your side is to eat like somebody who is expected.

So take that as settled rather than as encouragement, because encouragement wears off by Thursday. You are expected at eleven at night, and you were expected on every evening whose only sound was the fridge clicking on and off behind you. Exodus 24:11 has men eating in front of God and walking back down the mountain unharmed, and His Spirit does not rank a worktop under a mountain or half a bowl of cold pasta under a feast.