Standing While Everyone Eats

The chair at the end has been empty for eleven minutes, and she is at the counter with a dish cloth, wiping a surface that was already clean.

Behind her the hall is loud in the good way. Twenty six people at three tables pushed into one long one, elbows out, a boy up on his knees on a chair reaching for something his mother is passing him. Somebody laughs so hard he has to put his fork down. The room smells of food she has been cooking since Thursday.

She laid every place. She counted the forks twice, because she always counts twice. She was here at seven this morning with the windows open, and she found the extra chairs, and she is the reason the boy has a cushion under him. Now the room is full and eating, and the chair at the end is hers, and she cannot make herself sit in it.

She could not explain it if you asked. She would say she is fine, she likes doing it, she will eat later, there is always something. All of that is true and none of it is the reason. The reason is quieter and older than any of it: sitting down at that table feels like taking something. Serving it, she is safe. Sitting in it, she is asking to be fed by a room she is supposed to be feeding, and some part of her settled a long time ago that this was not on offer for her.

So she stays vertical. She fills a water jug that is not empty. She fetches a second serving spoon nobody asked for. Twice her sister has said sit down and eat, in that warm exasperated voice, and twice she has said in a minute. She means it. It is only ever not this minute.

Then, about the time the plates start going quiet, something happens that she has no category for. Her uncle, who is eighty one and does not stand up quickly for anything anymore, gets up. He walks the whole length of the table. He takes the cloth out of her hand, not roughly, and folds it and lays it on the counter. And he walks her back to the chair at the end and pulls it out and stands there until she sits.

So she sits, with her hands in her lap like a visitor in her own hall, and her cousin passes her a plate somebody has already filled, and she has no idea what to do with her face.

Maybe you know that hall. Maybe there is a cloth in your hand right now, in some form, at the edge of some room, and everyone in there would gladly feed you, and you have a reason ready for why you cannot sit.

He girds Himself

I want to say the true thing first, because the room has been saying the kind thing for eleven minutes and it has not moved you.

You are not standing there because you are humble. You may well be humble; that is not what is holding the cloth. You are standing there because somewhere along the line it got settled in you that being needed is a safer position than being loved, and a person who is serving cannot be sent away. That is not a fault to repent of. It is a bruise, it usually got there honestly, and most of the people who put it there are not in this hall.

But it does mean that when the meal is laid and the room is full, you are the one person in it who has not eaten.

Now hear what Jesus said about this, because it is one of the strangest sentences in Scripture and we have made it sound ordinary by reading it too often.

Blessed are those servants, whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching: verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them.Luke 12:37

Read it again slowly. He girds Himself. That is the cloth. That is the apron over the shoulder, the sleeves pushed back, the posture of somebody about to work. And He makes them sit down. Not invites. Not permits. Makes. He puts the servants in the chairs and then comes out and serves them, and the whole picture is upside down from the one you have been holding, and He is the one who turned it over.

You are being made to sit down by the Lord Himself, and the cloth was never the price of the chair. Luke 12:37 says He girds Himself and serves the ones He finds watching, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that written sentence out of a parable about servants and walks it the length of a real hall to a woman at a counter.

And notice who is doing the serving. He never says the work was wrong; nobody is excused from anything. It is that at His table He has taken the role you have been guarding with both hands, and there is no vacancy for it. Somebody is already girded. Somebody is already carrying the plates.

You have a Host who took the apron out of your hands, and He is not asking you to earn the room back. It is written that He makes them sit down to meat and comes forth and serves them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that reversal land in a body that has been standing up for years.

The table is prepared, not shared out

Now the psalm, because this whole category rests on it and I am not going to improve on it.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.Psalm 23:5

Notice what the Shepherd does not do. He does not hand David a cloth. He does not put him to work at the far end of it. He prepares. He anoints. He fills the cup past the line, and the psalm bothers to mention the overflow, which means it is not an accident and it is not an excess anybody is meant to feel awkward about. Somebody decided to pour past the top of the cup, and it was Him.

And the table is prepared in the presence of enemies, which means it is not laid in a safe empty room once everything is settled. It is laid in the room you are actually standing in, with the noise, and the history, and the reason you gave your sister for eating later.

You are seated at a table that was prepared for you and not by you, and there is oil on your head in a room where you thought you were staff. Psalm 23:5 says He prepares it and anoints and fills the cup past the brim, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person from the counter to the chair without ever telling them their serving was wrong.

I want to be careful here, because this is where a page like this usually goes wrong. Nobody is telling you to stop serving. Serving is not the problem and it never was. The uncle did not say the food was a mistake. He took the cloth out of her hand for the length of one meal and pulled out a chair, and the food was still good, and she had still made it.

You have a place at that table which is not a reward for the cooking, and it was set before you counted a single fork. It is written that He prepares the table, and prepares is a word about what was done before anybody arrived, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a person who has been on her feet for years that the chair was always in the plan.