The Chair Kept For Someone Expected

Colm nearly did not go.

The invitation had come in March and he had put it behind the sugar tin, which is where things go in his kitchen when he has decided something without admitting it. It stayed there through April and most of May. Twice he took it out, read it again, and put it back.

He was not being difficult. He had simply worked out, quite calmly, that he was on the wide list. The list you make at the end, when you count the tables and find you have eleven spare places, and somebody says, well, there is Colm.

He had known the bride since she was six. But he had not seen her in four years, and he had missed the engagement party for a reason that had been true at the time and sounded thin by June, and he had never once managed to explain that he was not staying away because he did not care.

He drove up on the Saturday with a shirt on the back seat and no real intention, and stopped twice, and arrived at ten past seven, which was late enough to slide in at the back.

It was in a walled garden behind an old greenhouse. Somebody had strung lanterns in a walnut tree, jam jars with candle stubs in them, thirty or forty of them, all the way along the branches, and under the tree was one long table, maybe sixty feet of it, made out of six or seven tables that did not match.

He stood at the gate with his hands in his pockets, working out where to put himself.

A woman with a tea towel over her shoulder came past carrying a bowl of peaches, looked at him, and said, "You are Colm?"

He said he was.

"Fourteen," she said, and pointed with her chin. "Down the far end, on the left. The gap."

And there was a gap. Two thirds of the way down a table with forty people already sitting at it and talking over each other, one chair had been left empty. There was a plate turned face down in front of it. A glass. A folded napkin with a sprig of something under the fold. His name in ink on a small card, in the bride's own handwriting, which he would know anywhere.

He stood there a second too long, and the woman with the peaches said, cheerfully, over her shoulder, "We have had your chair since March. Sit down, you are letting the heat out of the food."

If you have ever assumed the thing being waited for is being waited for by other people, walk in through that gate with me.

Somebody put appointments in the year

Most years do not have anything in them.

There are dates, obviously. Renewals. Somebody's birthday. The week the clocks change and everyone complains. But a date is not an appointment, and a year full of dates can still be a year in which nothing is expected, and that is a particular flavor of tiredness that people rarely name out loud. The year goes round. Nothing in it is looking forward to anything.

Now here is a thing worth knowing. When God set out the days that mattered in the year, He did not describe them as duties. He called them feasts, and He called them mine. Not the nation's. Not the priests'. His own appointments, in a year, with a people He had just brought out of a country.

Think about what that does to a calendar. Somebody has written themselves into your year on purpose, and He wrote His own name against the dates.

You have a God who keeps appointments, and He put them in the year before anyone had earned a place at one, and it is His Spirit rather than my enthusiasm that makes that read as an invitation instead of a schedule.

And every one of those days points forward, which is the part that changes the shape of the whole thing.

They were rehearsals. Each of them acted out something, in food and in timing and in gathering, that had not fully arrived yet. Scripture calls such things a shadow of things to come, and a shadow is a very specific piece of evidence: it means there is a body casting it, and the body is nearer than the shadow. You cannot have a shadow of nothing. Something is standing there.

I am going to be plain about what I am not doing here, because you may have been burned by this before. I am not going to tell you which of those days you are supposed to keep. That argument belongs somewhere else and it has been used, over and over, to make people feel like they arrived at a party without the right clothes. There is no line in this piece you can fall on the wrong side of. If you have never marked one of them in your life, nothing about the chair changes. His Spirit has never once used a calendar to shut a person out of a room.

What I want you to see is the direction. A rehearsal is not nostalgia. A rehearsal is a promise being practiced.

And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.Matthew 8:11

And look who He is talking to when He says it.

He is standing in a road talking to a Roman officer, an outsider by every measure anybody in that crowd used, a man who had said out loud that he was not worthy to have Jesus come under his roof. And Jesus turns to the people around Him and says, this is the sort of person who comes from the east and the west and sits down at that table.

The line is not about people who already belong. It is about people arriving from a long way off and sitting down with the founders of the family as though they had been expected, because they had been.

You are in that sentence, and it is written down in red and white and not in my opinion. The same Spirit who moved a tax collector to record a Roman's answer is setting it down inside a person who had already decided they were on the wide list.

And He is looking forward to it Himself. That is the part almost nobody hears. On the last night, at a table, He said He would not eat it again until it was fulfilled in the kingdom of God. He is waiting for a meal. Whatever else you have believed about God, hold that one for a second: there is something ahead that He is looking forward to, and there are chairs at it, and Revelation calls the people at that table blessed and calls the meal a marriage supper.