The Long Table in the Courtyard

The courtyard gets the last of the light for about forty minutes and then it goes blue, and in that forty minutes, for years, there used to be a table in it.

Nabil is forty and the table is against the far wall now, folded, with a sheet over it and two crates of something on top. It has been there long enough that the sheet has taken the shape of it.

His daughter asks about it while they are hanging out washing. She is eleven and she does not remember it properly, she remembers a feeling of a lot of people and being allowed to stay up. She says, why do we not do the table any more.

He says something about how busy everyone is now.

That is not true and he knows it is not true before the sentence is finished, and he stands there with a wet shirt in his hands and does the arithmetic he has been not doing for six years.

The table stopped the year he got serious. That is the answer. Nobody argued, nobody fell out, there was no incident. It went the way a thing goes when a man begins quietly editing a guest list. Fewer, and then fewer. The family upstairs, who are loud and generous and swear a great deal. The man from the shop on the corner who would come and eat and never once talk about anything but the shop. Old Suleyman, who argued with everybody about everything and once made Nabil's mother laugh until she had to sit down. The couple at number nine, whose life Nabil had opinions about.

He did not decide to stop inviting them. He decided, each time, that a particular Friday was not the right Friday. And then there were no Fridays.

He thought he was moving toward God. He would have told you so. He was reading more than he had ever read, and praying, and being careful, and the being careful spread outward from his own conduct to his own doorway without him noticing it cross over.

And the table is under a sheet, and his daughter cannot remember it, and he is standing in a courtyard holding a wet shirt.

You know that arithmetic. Your courtyard is a stairwell, or a street, or a break room, or a phone you stopped answering. But you know the year it started, and you know you have never once said out loud what it cost.

They accused Him of exactly this, and He did not deny it

There is an insult in the gospels that has become one of the most beautiful sentences in the book, and it became beautiful because He would not argue with it.

The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!Luke 7:34

He is quoting His critics. That is their sentence, not His, and He repeats it out loud in public and then does not defend Himself against it. What He says next is that wisdom is justified of all her children, which is roughly: watch what this produces and then tell me whether it was wrong.

Sit with the shape of it. The one person in history who never once compromised anything is the person who acquired a reputation for the company He kept. Not a reputation for austerity. Not a reputation for withdrawal. He was slandered as a man who ate too freely with the wrong people, and He did not adjust the practice to fix the reputation.

You have been given a pattern to follow, and it is the one that got Him talked about. That is the written word and not a soft opinion of mine at a washing line, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an insult recorded in Luke and lays it down in a courtyard going blue.

Now hold that against what you have been doing. Your table stopped in order to protect something. His table was the very thing they used against Him, and He kept it going all the way to a last supper.

A table is the most expensive kind of nearness

In that part of the world, then and now, eating with somebody is not a neutral act. It is not coffee. It is not a scheduled meeting. To eat at a man's table is to be received by him, publicly, in a way everybody in the street can see, and it costs the host his reputation if the guest is the wrong guest.

Which is exactly why the critics used it. They did not accuse Him of talking to sinners. Talking is cheap. They accused Him of eating with them, because eating is the costly one, and He chose the costly one on purpose and repeatedly.

You are invited to spend what He spent, and it is already settled that spending it is not a compromise. Luke 7 records the accusation without a defense attached, and the same Spirit who filled Him at the Jordan is the one making that a present fact in a man with a wet shirt in his hands.

I want to guard it, because there is a version of this that would be no good to you. I am not saying nothing is ever unwise, and I am not saying a person never steps away from anything. Scripture is not vague about conduct and neither am I. What I am saying is that He drew the line around behavior and never around the doorway, and when you moved yours from the first to the second you moved it to a place He never put it, and it has cost you a courtyard.

And nobody who taught you the careful version is on trial here. Most of them were handed it. Old Suleyman is not a category, he is a man who made your mother laugh until she had to sit down, and he is probably still two doors along.