Tolerated At The Table

The plantain went over her plate.

Not thrown. Not withheld. Lifted, in a perfectly friendly way, across the space above her setting and put down in front of her cousin, who was mid story and needed it more, and the story was funny, and everybody laughed, and the bowl stayed down there at that end for the rest of the meal.

Nobody at that table would ever be unkind to Delores. That is the thing that makes it impossible to explain. They ask after her job. They say she looks well. Twice in the afternoon somebody says something about her in the third person while she is sitting right there, which is a small thing, and she has learned to smile at the plate when it happens.

She eats fast. She has eaten fast at that table for eleven years. She keeps her elbows in, she takes a normal portion, she never asks for anything to be passed, and she has an exit line ready before the pudding arrives, something about the traffic or an early start. She is out of the door within twenty minutes of the plates going into the sink and everyone says what a shame, she never stays.

She is welcome. Every one of them would say so and every one of them would mean it.

She is not wanted, and there is a difference between those two words that will not go into a sentence she could say out loud, because it sounds like an accusation against people who have not actually done anything.

Welcome is a door that has not been locked. Wanted is somebody watching for you out of the window.

So Delores has learned the posture. Take up little space. Be easy. Do not need anything passed. Leave before the leaving becomes noticeable. And she has carried that posture out of that dining room and into every room she has been in since, including the ones where God is.

And that is where I want to catch you, because I think you have read four paragraphs about yourself.

You know how you eat when you are tolerated. Quickly, neatly, with your coat somewhere you can reach it. You know the exit line, and you know how long you have to stay for it to be polite. And somewhere in you, so far down that you would deny it if a friend asked you gently, is the settled arrangement that you are a person who is allowed to be places rather than a person anybody actually wants there.

Nobody has ever told you that in the oldest covenants there are, the meal is not the thanks at the end. The meal is the thing itself.

The meal is how an oath is closed

When two parties in the ancient world cut an oath, they did not shake hands and go home. They sat down and ate.

Picture Isaac and a king who had run him off his own wells, standing awkwardly in the same field, making peace. What closes it is not a speech. They eat and drink, and in the morning they swear and part in peace. Picture Jacob and Laban after twenty years of suspicion, piling up a heap of stones and then sitting down on the hillside to eat bread beside it.

Nobody in that world ate with a person they were merely tolerating. A shared table said in public what the words had said in private: this person is inside my house now, and everyone watching may take note.

And then there is the strangest meal in the Old Testament, which almost nobody has heard of. Seventy four men climb a mountain after an oath is cut at the foot of it. They see the God of Israel, and there is sapphire under His feet like the body of heaven for clearness, and the sentence that follows is one of the great understatements of Scripture: upon the nobles of the children of Israel He laid not His hand. Also they saw God, and did eat and drink.

They had a meal. On the mountain. In front of God, and He did not lay a hand on them.

So hear this before we go on, because it is about your chair and not about theirs. You are inside a covenant whose closing act is a shared meal, and you were brought in to eat rather than to serve at the edge of the room: Exodus 24:11 has men eating in the presence of God and coming down that mountain alive, and the Holy Spirit is not showing you that as a curiosity. He is showing you the shape of the seat you are in.

The hand that gave it out deliberately

Now come to a borrowed upstairs room with one long low table in it.

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.Matthew 26:26

Watch His hands, because everything is in the verbs. He took. He blessed. He brake. He gave. Not set it down in the middle for people to reach across each other. Not left it on a dish to travel round the table and pass over whoever was quiet that evening. He put it into their hands, one pair at a time, deliberately, looking at each of them.

And not one of them had earned it that week. They had argued about rank on the road. One of them was hours from swearing he had never met Him. The bread went into every pair of hands in that room anyway, because a covenant meal is not a reward for the company. It is a declaration about the host.

So take your own hands out of your lap. You are given to, personally, by the One who does the passing, and nothing was ever handed over your head to somebody more deserving down the table: Matthew 26:26 is the record of it, and the Spirit is putting that verse in the room you are sitting in tonight so that it stops being an ancient supper and becomes your own place setting.

And if you are eating alone

Let me speak to somebody the Sunday dinner picture does not fit, because this table is not for households only.

If you eat standing at the counter with the radio on, if the flat is quiet, if the person you used to eat across from is not there any more, then hear the invitation as it is actually worded. Christ says He stands at the door and knocks, and if anyone opens, He will come in and sup with him. Sup. Sit down and eat. That is not a metaphor about warm feelings; it is a chair being pulled out at a table for one.

Nobody eating in the company of God is eating alone, and His word says He is the One who does the coming in. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes a kitchen counter into a table with two at it, and you are not on the outside of anything tonight.