He Handed It To The Ones Who Were Leaving

He stopped going the way a fire goes out, which is to say not all at once and not on purpose.

The autumn his mother died he missed two Sundays, for the funeral and the week after it, and everybody understood that. Then he missed one because he was tired in a way that sleep was not touching. Then one because by then it had got easier not to. By the middle of November he had missed six, and had crossed a line he never saw, the one where turning up again would mean being asked where he had been, and he did not have an answer that would not have him crying in a doorway in front of people.

So he waited. Not consciously, at first. He kept his phone on the table on Sunday afternoons. He kept his phone on the table on Sunday afternoons for a long time.

He had been on the rota. He had put the chairs out for nine years, and he knew what the boiler did in February and who to ring about it, and he had driven the same two old ladies home every week for most of a decade, and in the September he had helped carry his own mother up that aisle.

Week five, nothing. Week eleven, nothing.

There was a Christmas card in the December. Printed, with the church's name across the front and a service list inside, addressed to the household. He stood in the hall with it for a while, and then he put it in the recycling and went and did the washing up with the radio on very loud.

That was eleven years ago.

He is fifty nine now and perfectly all right. He has a good life and a dog and a shed he is genuinely proud of. And on a Sunday, at about twenty to eleven, something in him still turns toward it, and in eleven years he has never once said that out loud to another human being.

You may have your own version of that. Yours might be eleven years or it might be eighteen months, and the shape of it might be different, but you know the hour.

And before I go anywhere else with you, I want to say the true thing about it, because people hurry past this and hurrying past it does real damage.

Nobody came. That is a real loss and it is not a small one.

I am not going to explain it away with a reason, and I am not going to hand you somebody to blame for it either, because neither of those would be honest and neither of them would help. What I will say plainly is that you noticed, and you were right to notice, and the years do not come back, and nothing here returns them to you.

What I have got is a different thing, and I think it may be the thing you have actually been waiting for underneath the other one.

The night it was handed out

Paul is writing to a church that has made an absolute mess of its own table. He could have opened with the mess. Instead he goes back to the source of the thing, and there is one detail he will not leave out, and it is a timestamp.

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when He was handed over took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it, and said, "This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me."1 Corinthians 11:23

The night when He was handed over.

Not a good night. Not a night when the room had earned anything. And Luke, telling the same evening, puts in one line that the mind slides straight off, because it is almost too much to hold:

But look, the hand of the one who hands me over is with me at the table.Luke 22:21

At the table. Not outside the door. Not shown out first, quietly, before the bread came round. The hand was on the table while it was being passed, and it was passed anyway, and it went to him too.

And it was not only that one. Every man in that room was hours away from leaving. The one who would sell Him. The one who would stand at a fire and swear he had never met Him. And the nine who would simply not be there when it mattered. He knew all of it. He had already said so out loud that evening, to their faces.

And He took bread, and He gave thanks, and He handed it to them.

The invitation was issued to the ones who were leaving. That is not a footnote in the story. That is the design of it, and everything this house has ever got right, it got right by remembering that.

A table set every week, on purpose, and nobody standing at the front of it deciding who has been good enough this time. Weekly, so that no one ever has to earn their way back to it, because the moment it is only set occasionally, somebody has to sit in judgement on the occasion.

Now I have to be careful with you, and I would rather be careful than warm.

I cannot tell you that a particular set of people in a particular building will be glad to see you. I do not know them, I do not know what happened, and it is not mine to promise on their behalf. Anybody who promises you that is spending money that is not theirs to spend.

What I can tell you is whose table it is, and it was never theirs. He set it. He handed it out on the worst night of His life to a room full of men who were about to go. And nobody on this earth has the authority to take back an invitation they did not issue.

You have been waiting for a phone call. I understand that completely, and the phone call would have been right, and it should have come. But the thing you have been waiting eleven years for was never in that phone call's gift. It was given out long before you were born, in a borrowed upstairs room, by the only Person who could ever withdraw it, to a table of people who were leaving that same night. Scripture is where that stands and His Spirit is the one who keeps handing it out.