The Table Set For A Day Not Here Yet

Renata was the one everybody called, and she was good at it, and that was the whole problem.

Christenings. Anniversaries. Two wakes in one November. If there was a hall to be booked or two hundred empanadas to be made or somebody's cousin who needed collecting from the station, they called Renata, and Renata came, and it was done properly. She was thirty four years old and there was not one bad thing you could say about her.

She simply had nothing of her own on the horizon. Her year was a ring of other people's dates and she moved around it like a woman walking a track, and she was not bitter about it. Flat is not the same as bitter. Flat is quieter and it lasts longer.

The farewell dinner for Emilio was in September, and she did the food, obviously.

He was going four hundred kilometers away for work, which everybody agreed was the right thing and nobody was glad about, and by ten o'clock the table looked like a battlefield and half the family were out in the yard because the kitchen had got too warm, and Renata was at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, doing what she does.

Doña Pilar came in behind her with a bottle in her hand. Sparkling apple cider, gold foil on the neck, unopened, the one nobody had got around to.

"Write on this," she said, and put a roll of masking tape on the counter.

Renata dried her hands. "Write what?"

"The night he comes home."

"We do not know when that is."

"So do not write a day," Pilar said, as though this were obvious, which to her it was. "Write what it is for. Then put it up there, where you have to look at it every time you get the milk out."

So Renata tore off a strip of tape and stuck it around the neck of the bottle, and wrote on it in pen, and stood on a chair and put it on the high shelf above the fridge, next to the pan nobody uses.

And then everyone went home and she washed up and that was the end of the evening.

Except that it was not, because for the next two years she saw that bottle every single day.

Reaching past it for the milk. Reaching past it for the pan she never used. It was in the corner of her eye at seven in the morning and at eleven at night, and she got so used to it that visitors would ask about it and she would say oh, that, and then find she wanted to explain the whole thing and had to stop herself.

And here is what surprised her, and it was not that she missed her cousin.

It was that there was now something in her kitchen that pointed forward.

One night in February, in a bad week, in the middle of a year with nothing much in it, she opened the fridge for the milk and her hand went past the bottle and she stopped with the door open and the cold coming out.

For the first time in longer than she could account for, there was something in that house that was not somebody else's.

God keeps a calendar, and it is not a duty roster

Open Leviticus 23 and the first thing that happens is a claim of ownership over a year.

These are the feasts of the LORD, it says, holy gatherings, which you shall proclaim in their seasons. Not the feasts of Israel. His. He calls them my appointed times, and what follows is a list of dates in a year with His name on every one of them, spread from spring through to autumn so that no season goes by without one.

Now notice what kind of thing they are. They are appointments. They are gatherings. People traveled, people cooked, people camped out in shelters made of branches for a week and the children thought it was the best thing that ever happened to them.

And several of them come with an instruction that is not the kind most people are braced for.

Rejoice in your feast, says Deuteronomy 16, you and your son and your daughter and the servant and the stranger inside your gates. And then, a verse later, in case anybody missed it: thou shalt surely rejoice. That is gladness written into the appointment as the assignment. Somebody in the history of your life may have handed you these as a compliance schedule. Whoever they were, they were not reading the same paragraph.

You have been invited to something rather than rostered onto it, and Leviticus 23 calls them the feasts of the LORD rather than a list of obligations. It is His Spirit, not my paragraph, that gives the word invitation back to somebody who has heard it as a shift for years.

And then there is the thing they all do, which is the reason this category closes the set.

They point forward. A rehearsal is not a performance and it is not pretending to be one. Paul calls the appointed times a shadow of things to come, and I want to be careful, because that sentence has been used as a weapon in an argument that is not going to happen on this page. Leave the argument. Take the phrase. Things to come. Whatever else is true, they lean toward something ahead of them.

Which brings us to a table on a Thursday night, and a cup nobody finished.

He is at the Passover meal with them, hours from everything, and He takes the cup, and He says something that would have stopped the room if any of them had been able to hear it properly.

But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.Matthew 26:29

Read what He did there. He put something down on purpose. On the worst night in history, at the last meal He would eat with His friends before the cross, He deliberately left one cup unfinished and gave a reason: because there is a night coming, and I am keeping this for it.

He set a bottle on a high shelf.

You have something in front of you that Jesus Himself is looking forward to, and Matthew 26:29 is His own sentence about it, and the same Spirit who carried that line down two thousand years to your kitchen is in the room while you read it.

And John, much later, is told what to write about the day the cup is finally drunk: blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. Called. There is an invitation with your name on it and it is already out.

Now let me be plain about one thing, because this category is where people get hit. I am not going to tell you which of these days you must keep or how you must keep them. That fight belongs somewhere else, between people who love each other and can argue kindly. Nothing on this page is a requirement, and if you have never kept a single one of them in your life you are not outside anything and never were. Nothing written in Scripture turns these days into a turnstile, and His Spirit is not standing at one with a clipboard. What is being handed to you is not a schedule. It is the news that the year has His fingerprints on it and that somebody is expecting you.