Standing At The Counter

Nine at night, and the only light in the kitchen is the one coming in from the hall.

The plate is held in one hand over the sink, because that way the crumbs go straight down and there is nothing to wipe afterwards. It is a good plate. She cooked properly, which is the thing people never believe: it is not that she cannot be bothered to eat, it is that she cannot be bothered to sit.

Because sitting is the problem. Sitting means the chair opposite. Sitting means putting a plate down on a table laid for one and looking at the whole arrangement for eleven minutes. Standing takes four minutes and the radio is on and it is nearly fine.

She has done this since March. She would tell you she is fine, and she is telling the truth: she is fine. This is not tragedy. It is a habit that quietly moved in, and the light stays off because the light makes it a scene.

You know which counter is yours. Maybe you eat over the sink like this. Maybe you take it to the sofa with something playing so the room has voices in it, or you eat standing at the fridge with the door open, or you have simply stopped calling it dinner because dinner implies an occasion and this is just fuel. Whatever the shape of it, you have arranged your evenings so that nobody, including you, ever has to look at an empty chair.

So come out of the kitchen and up a mountain, because there is a scene up there almost nobody has been shown.

An oath has just been sworn between God and a nation. Everything about that morning has been serious: the reading out loud, the answer of the people, the blood at the foot of the altar. And then comes the part that gets read past.

Seventy-four men climb the mountain. Elders, leaders, the whole senior company, up out of the camp. And they see God. The text says so plainly and does not explain it, and under His feet there is something like a pavement of sapphire, clear as the sky itself.

And there, in the presence of God, they ate and drank.

That is what happened next. Not fell down dead. Not backed away. They sat on a mountain with the sky under His feet and they had a meal, and the meal is the part the account bothers to record, because in that world an oath was not finished until the two parties ate together.

That happened. On a mountain, with food, with hands, in company.

The meal was never the decoration

Notice what the meal was doing up there. It was not a reward for the ceremony. It was the seal on it.

That is how these things always closed. Two parties bound themselves, and then they sat down and ate, because eating with somebody was the visible, public, unmistakable statement that the matter was settled and the two of them were now on the same side of a table. Nobody ate with a party they were still negotiating with. You ate with the one it was finished with.

So the strangest sentence in the whole New Testament stops being strange.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.Revelation 3:20

Read what He asks for at the door. Not a meeting. Not a performance review. Supper. The risen Christ, standing outside a room, and the thing He names as His purpose in coming in is that the two of you will eat together.

Right now, as you read, you are somebody He intends to sit down with, and you were that before you ever cooked anything tonight. This is not me being warm at you. Revelation 3:20 says supper in plain words, and the Holy Spirit is at work in you this minute making a sentence written to a lukewarm church into a knock on your own kitchen door.

One person is a table

Here is the thing that has to be said out loud, because a lot of church language accidentally implies the opposite.

A covenant meal is not a household event with a minimum number. It is not a Sunday. It is not something you qualify for by having people. When the risen Christ names supper at a door, He is speaking to one person in one room, and the entire promise is that He comes in and eats with them, singular, no second human being required to make it count.

You have a place at that table today, and you have it in the kitchen you are actually standing in. That is written and not felt: Revelation 3:20 names the meal and names the company, and His Spirit is the one taking that written promise and setting it down beside a plate held over a sink.

And nothing here rules on anybody's Sunday. This is not about who may take what at which table in which building, and no article has the right to adjudicate that over your shoulder. This is about the ordinary plate in your hand at nine o'clock tonight, and who is present when you eat it.

What it costs, honestly

There are terms, and here they are, and one of them is genuinely yours.

God's side is the whole enormous weight: the oath, the seal, the finished work, the standing invitation that does not expire and was never conditional on your evenings improving. His side is settled.

Your side is the door. He knocks and He does not break it down, which is not because He is short of power but because a meal cannot be forced on anybody and still be a meal. So the thing that is yours is small, ordinary, and real: pull out the chair. Put the light on. Sit.