The Chair Nobody Moves

The table is not one table. It is the good table with both leaves in, plus the kitchen table pushed against the end of it, plus a folding card table at the far end for the children, and the whole thing runs from the window to the doorway and you have to go around through the hall if you want the bathroom.

Twenty two people. Three kinds of tablecloth. A ham at one end and a pot of rice with the good pan crust on it at the other, and somebody's flan in the refrigerator that everybody has been warned about touching.

And down at the window end there is a chair.

It is a wooden one with a woven seat that has come loose on one side, and it does not match anything, and it is at the corner where the good table meets the kitchen table so it is slightly out of the run of the others. Nobody sits in it. Not the kids, who sit anywhere. Not the aunt who comes late. It has an inch of clear space around it that the other chairs do not have, the way people keep an inch around a thing.

Chuy is forty eight and he is the one who puts it back.

Every year, somebody drifts it toward the wall to make room for the drinks table, and every year, at some point in the afternoon, Chuy walks past and takes hold of the back of it and slides it into the corner by the window without saying anything and without breaking his conversation. He has been doing that for eleven years. He would tell you he is not doing anything.

Eleven years ago his father Rafael sat there. The first Christmas after, his mother set a plate at that place and nobody could eat, and they never did that again. The second year the plate was gone and the chair stayed. By about the fourth year they had stopped explaining it to anybody new, and by the seventh the explaining would have been stranger than the silence, and now it is simply a chair at the window that nobody sits in, the way a house has a stair that creaks.

Chuy has private opinions about himself for this. He thinks it is probably morbid. He thinks a healthy man would have taken the chair to the garage in year three. He has decided that what he is doing is not remembering, which would be fine, but wanting, which he suspects is a different and softer thing, and he does not like being a man who wants something that is not available.

Then this year Dani comes. Dani is the girlfriend of his nephew Toño, and she is twenty three and has never been in this house, and she is being extremely polite in the way people are when they are counting the exits.

They sit down. Somebody says the blessing badly, which is traditional. Plates start going.

And Dani, looking at the empty chair, says the thing nobody has said in seven years. She says: is somebody still coming?

The table does that thing. It goes quiet in layers, the far end last, because the card table takes a second to catch up.

And Chuy hears somebody starting the fast no, the polite no, the no that closes the subject, and before it gets out he says, in a normal voice, with a serving spoon in his hand:

Yes. Just not this year.

Nobody says anything for a moment. Then his Tía Meche, who has not said his father's name out loud at that table in eleven years, pushes her chair back, goes to the cabinet, comes back with a plate and a fork and a folded napkin, and sets them down at the chair by the window.

Then she sits down and says pass the rice.

You know something about that chair from your own side of it. There is a thing you expect that you have stopped saying out loud, because saying it out loud makes it a claim and you would rather not have to defend a claim in front of people who love you. So you keep it as a habit instead of a hope, and you put the chair back every year without breaking your conversation. So take this before anything else. You are expected at a table that has already been announced, and the announcement was not made by you. That is not comfort I am arranging for you. It is a sentence Christ said out loud at a supper in front of witnesses, and Scripture wrote it down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes something in the future arrive as an address rather than as a wish.

The one keeping a chair is Christ

Plainly first, because this picture is the one people get wrong, and a picture people get wrong cannot comfort anybody.

When Scripture speaks of a feast at the end, and when it calls the church a bride, it is not describing a private romance between Jesus and one person and it is not a wedding photograph. The bride is the church: one whole people, out of every nation and every century, and the feast is a gathering of that entire company at one table. It is a room with the leaves in and the kitchen table pushed onto the end of it and the card table for the ones who came latest. Corporate, crowded, loud, and a place laid for everyone who belongs to Him.

You have a place inside that company, and it is already set. That is not a projection of what you would like. Scripture describes a gathering, not a private meeting, and the Holy Spirit is given as the deposit on it, the down payment, the piece of it that has already been handed over.

Now go and read the strangest sentence anybody has ever said at a supper.

For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.Luke 22:16

That is Christ, at the table, on the last night, with the bread in front of Him. And what He announces is a fast. He says He is not eating this again until.

Sit with what kind of sentence that is. It is not a teaching about the future. It is a man at a table telling the people in the room that He is leaving a place empty on purpose, and that He intends to come back to it. He is the one keeping the chair. Nobody had to persuade Him to hope; He said it Himself, in front of witnesses, hours before the worst night of His life, and He said it in the plural, to a company, about a table they would all be at.

You are expected at a meal Christ Himself said He is waiting for, and He said it as a settled thing. That is what stands written in Luke 22, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a sentence like that from the category of doctrine into the category of an appointment.

Expectation is not sentiment

Here is where a man like Chuy needs the ground checked under his feet, because he has been quietly prosecuting himself for eleven years.

Sentiment is a feeling you keep because the keeping of it is pleasant. Expectation is a different animal entirely: it is what you do about a thing that has been announced. A woman who keeps a room ready because her son wrote and said he is coming is not being sentimental. She is being accurate, and if you took the bed out of that room you would not be helping her face reality, you would be asking her to disbelieve a letter.

So the question about that chair is never whether it is healthy. The question is whether there is a letter. And there is one, and it is not a private impression or a hope somebody worked up. It is a recorded sentence from Christ at a supper, and everything since then has been the church setting the table according to it.

You are not being sentimental, and the thing you have stopped saying out loud has a written word underneath it. His word puts the announcement in Christ's own mouth in Luke 22, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man stop apologizing for expecting something God said.

And nothing here is a timetable. There is no date in this, no season, no calculation, and anybody who hands you one is selling something. What you have is not a schedule. What you have is a chair.