You Stopped Eating Properly

The kettle does most of the cooking now.

It boils for tea, obviously. It also boils for the couscous that takes four minutes and the packet soup and the thing in the pot that says just add water. Three times an evening, sometimes four. The hob has one working ring and it has not needed the other three since the spring.

The oven is where the roasting tin lives. That is its job now: storage. There is a bag of flour in the cupboard that went hard eleven months ago and he has not thrown it out, because throwing it out would mean deciding something.

He eats at the counter, standing up, with his coat on more often than not, looking at his phone. It takes four minutes. Then the one plate goes in the bowl, and the bowl gets rinsed, and the kitchen is exactly as it was, and the evening carries on.

And the good plates are on the top shelf. Six of them, and the two serving dishes, up where you need to reach. They came down every week once, when the house was full and loud and somebody always wanted feeding. Nobody moved them up there in a fit of grief. They simply migrated, the way things do, over about two years, until the shelf they were on was needed for something more useful.

Here is the arithmetic he has done without ever saying it out loud: a proper meal is for people. Chopping is for people. The good plates are for people. And he is one person, and one person is not a reason.

He is not sad about it, particularly. That is the thing you have to understand. He would tell you he is fine, and he means it. It is just that somewhere along the way, eating turned into refuelling, and nobody was in the room to notice the day it changed.

You know whether this is you. Maybe your version is the same fourteen meals on rotation. Maybe it is cereal at half past eight because cooking for one felt absurd. Maybe you still cook, and you eat it standing over the hob, because sitting down alone at a laid table is somehow the loneliest thing in the house.

I want to show you something about tables that almost nobody is told, and it is not a tip about self care. It is the legal center of the whole covenant.

They went up the mountain and had lunch

There is a scene near the middle of Exodus that reads like an anticlimax until you know what it is showing.

An oath has just been sworn between God and a whole people. Then seventy elders and Moses go up the mountain. Something happens that the text refuses to describe properly, except to say they saw the God of Israel and there was something like sapphire under His feet. And then this:

Also they saw God, and did eat and drink.Exodus 24:11

They ate. On the mountain. In front of Him. That is how the chapter ends.

It is not a picnic tacked on to a serious event. In that world, the meal was the ratifying act. An oath was sworn and then the parties sat down and ate together, and the eating was what made it public and finished and binding. No meal, no covenant. You could say every word correctly and if nobody sat down to eat, the thing was not done.

So you are inside an oath that was closed with a shared meal, and the eating was never an extra. Exodus 24:11 puts food and drink in front of God as the last legal act of the day, and the Holy Spirit is not turning that into a metaphor for you tonight; He is telling you what your table is for.

Watch the father's hands, not the son's speech

Now the other scene, and I want to be careful how we come at it.

Everyone knows the story. A young man comes back up a road. He has a speech prepared and he has been rehearsing it for days. He gets about a sentence and a half in.

And I am not making you the son tonight. That is not your part in it tonight, and it is not why you came here. Watch the father's hands instead, because his hands are the point.

You are already the person those hands move for. The word shows no father weighing a case before he lays a table, and His Spirit is not weighing one over your counter tonight. The instinct comes first, and it was turned toward you before anybody explained anything.

And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry.Luke 15:23

He calls for the calf while the speech is still going on. Not after the terms are agreed, not once everybody has calmed down and the household has had a meeting. Mid-sentence. The man's first instinct on seeing somebody he loves is to lay a table, and the table gets called for before anything has been explained, negotiated or earned.

That is what God's instinct with a person looks like. Not a lecture, not a probation period. A table, immediately, while the other party is still working out what to say.

Right now, as you read, the assumption that you have to arrive at a table properly is being taken off you. What is written shows a meal called for while a man is still mid-speech, and the Spirit of God is not standing at your counter waiting for you to become a household first.

One person eating alone is a person being eaten with

Say the obvious thing plainly, because this is where the ache actually lives: nobody here is telling you to invite people over.

Some readers could not do that this week if they wanted to. Some are in a flat where nobody comes. Some are the only one left of a table that used to seat six. Nothing in this message measures a meal by how many chairs are occupied.

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

Look at the arithmetic in that verse. One door. One voice. One man. And a supper.

That is not a crowd. That is exactly the size of your kitchen. The covenant meal in your life is not a full house on a Sunday and it is not something anybody has to rule on for you; it is one plate, laid on purpose, with the One who swore Himself to you already in the room.

You have a place at a table that was set before you stopped setting one, and the setting of it did not depend on your company. Revelation 3:20 says He comes in and eats, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that supper an actual event in an actual kitchen rather than a warm idea about God.