The Table You Cannot Pay For

Emilio has been the one who pays for twenty-six years, and last month he sat at that table and could not have paid for the bread.

Nobody knew. That is the first thing. Nobody at that table has any idea, and if you told them tonight the first reaction of about nine of them would be genuine hurt that he had not said.

But he sat there, in his own family, at the table he has been at every month since he was thirty, and something had changed in the room that only he could see.

It is not that he thinks they would ask him to leave. He is not insane and they are not monsters. It is more precise and more difficult than that.

It is that he no longer knows what he is doing there.

Because for twenty-six years the answer to that question was obvious and unspoken, and it was: he is the one who makes this happen. He is not the head of that family by birth and he never claimed to be, but he has been the one who quietly made a great many of those evenings occur, and the seat came with the function, and he never once separated the two of them in his own mind because there was never any reason to.

Now the function is gone and he is still sitting in the chair.

He said it to himself in the car on the way home. He said: I do not know what I am at that table now.

Now hear me before anything else, because there is a way to write this next part that would be cruel.

I am not going to ask you how it happened. Not once anywhere on this page. Whether it was your doing or somebody else's or nobody's makes no difference at all to what I have to say, and there is no point in this article where you have to give an account of anything.

And nobody here is going to tell you that your family will be fine about it. I do not know your family. That sentence is handed out far too easily by people who have never met anybody involved.

What I can tell you about is a different table, and about that one I can speak with complete confidence, because the terms are written down.

You have your own version. There is a place you have sat for years, and the seat came with a function, and the function has gone, and you have not been able to work out whether the seat came with it.

The invitation has the price written into it

There is a call in Isaiah that reads like a market trader and then does something a market trader would never do.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.Isaiah 55:1

Buy without money. It is deliberately contradictory and it is meant to be. He uses the language of a transaction and then removes the only thing that makes a transaction a transaction, and He does it twice in one line: without money, and without price.

And notice who is named specifically. He that hath no money. Not as an afterthought, not as a special provision for hard cases. That person is called out by name in the middle of the invitation, which means the invitation was drafted with him in view from the beginning.

That is the exact person sitting in a car after a family dinner wondering what he is doing at a table.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are the one this was addressed to. That is not my encouragement: the written word names the man with no money inside the invitation itself, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in somebody who has always been the one who pays.

And the price was removed rather than reduced. Not lowered for a difficult season: the word says without money and without price, twice in one sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact rather than a special arrangement that could be reviewed.

Your welcome was never priced

This is the sentence this whole category exists for, and this is the article where it is most concrete.

Nothing about how you are received has ever depended on what is in your hands.

And your seat did not come with the function. That is the fear and it deserves a direct answer: the word says you are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God, and household is a family word rather than a functional one, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which is a statement about parentage rather than about contribution.

And the arrangement was never a trade. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast, and every one of those clauses is closing off the possibility that a seat at that table was ever bought, in the good years or in this one.

You did not buy your way in when you were paying for everything. You only felt like you had.