Yet There Is Room

It was his idea in the first place, which is the part that stings.

After the funeral, when the house on the corner had emptied out and the widow was alone in it, he said to the four or five men standing in his own kitchen that they should eat together on Thursdays. All of them. Whoever. And he said something to God under his breath that evening about keeping that table going as long as he had a house.

And it went. For most of a year it went beautifully. Fourteen, sixteen people on a Thursday, children under the table, three languages in the room at once, his wife making the same rice every week because it was easier, and neighbors who had lived on that street for eleven years without speaking sitting down next to each other.

Then his father got ill in another country and he was away for two months, and when he came back the table had moved to the house at the end of the road, because of course it had, because it had to happen somewhere.

He went twice. Then he stopped going.

It has been three years. The Thursday table is now thirty people and has outgrown two houses. He hears about it. His wife goes sometimes and he says he is tired.

And what he thinks, in the part of himself that he does not say out loud, is that he gave up his seat. That the table was his and he let go of it, and a table that has doubled in size does not have a gap in it shaped like the man who used to run it. There is no room. He can see there is no room. He has heard them talking about the parking.

You may have a room like that. Something you started or carried or belonged to, that went on without you and got bigger without you, and now you look at the size of it and read the size as an answer.

The full house in the parable

Let me take you to a parable about a large supper, and let me take you specifically to a line most people read past, because it is a servant's progress report and it does not look like it is carrying anything.

The man has thrown a feast. The invited guests have all made excuses. So he sends the servant out into the streets and lanes to bring in the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind, and the servant does it, and he comes back and reports.

And the servant said, Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.Luke 14:22

You are looking at a full room and reading it as a closed door, and in this house a full room has never meant that. Luke 14:22 has the servant report a full house and be sent straight back out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been out in the lanes doing that bringing in.

And yet there is room

Sit in the shape of that sentence, because it is doing something no human table does.

The servant has just filled the house with everybody he could find. This is not a half hearted sweep. He has been through the streets and the lanes and brought back the people nobody else was going to feed. And his report is: it is done, and there is still space.

Every table you have ever set has had a limit. That is not a criticism of tables, it is what a room is. Twelve chairs is twelve chairs and the thirteenth person stands, and everybody knows it, and this is why you are reading the size of that Thursday table the way you are reading it.

This one does not work like that. In this parable a full house is not the end of the invitation, it is the reason for the next sentence, which is go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in.

You are looking at a full room and reading it as a closed door, and in this house a full room has never once meant that. Luke 14:22 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a story told at a Pharisee's dinner and stands it in a man's own kitchen three years later.

And notice who is in that house by the time the servant makes his report. Not the people who were invited first. The ones brought in off the street, in the order they were found, with no seating plan and no claim on the host at all.

You have no claim at this table and you never needed one, because nobody sitting there has one either. That is the plain sense of who fills the house in Luke 14, and the Spirit of God has been out in the lanes doing that bringing in for three years while you counted the chairs.

The table was never yours

Now let me say the harder thing, because I am the one who is going to be believed on this, having kept a table or two.

The Thursday table was never yours. You started it. That is a real and good thing and I am not taking it from you. But a table belongs to whoever eats at it, and the moment fourteen people sat down at yours it stopped being your possession and became a thing that existed.

So what happened while you were away was not that somebody took it. It was that it kept being what it always was, in a different room, which is the only way a living thing can behave.

And the reason that matters is this: a man who thinks the table was his has to be given it back before he can sit at it, and nobody can give it back to him, so he never goes. A man who knows the table was never his can simply arrive at seven with something in his hands.

You are a guest at a supper somebody else is hosting, and that has been true since the first Thursday. Scripture puts the host at the head of this table and every one of us in a chair, and His Spirit is the one carrying extra chairs in from the yard when the room fills.

And I will not pretend they have been sitting there mourning you. They have not. Thirty people are eating well on Thursdays and it is going wonderfully and nobody is looking at a gap. That is not a wound. That is what you wanted. You just did not picture yourself standing outside it.