Come Without A Price On It

The table in that courtyard is made of three trestles and a door and it goes almost the whole length of the wall, and anybody who walks past is asked to sit down.

Not invited exactly. Asked, in the way that makes it awkward to keep walking.

Nabil has walked past it eleven times.

He knows what it is. Everybody in that street knows what it is. On a Thursday a family called the Bishara family puts that table out and cooks for however many turn up, and it has been going for about nine years, and it started because somebody's mother could not stop cooking for eight after her sons left.

Nabil has walked past eleven times because of the arithmetic.

He is not going to pretend it is anything more complicated than that. He does the arithmetic on the way down the street. If he sits down he will have to bring something next time, and what he can bring is not what other people bring, and he will end up being the man who eats and does not bring, and everyone will be perfectly nice about it, and he would rather walk past.

Anybody who has been short of money for long enough understands that entire calculation without it being explained.

On the twelfth time a girl of about nine came out and stood in front of him.

She said, "Are you coming in or not, because there's a chair."

He said afterwards that he had no defense prepared for a nine year old, and that he sat down mostly because standing there arguing with a child in a street was worse.

He was there four hours.

Nobody asked him for anything, then or since. There is no sign-up sheet. He has been three more times and on the last one somebody handed him a bowl to carry to the far end and that is the entire extent of anybody's expectations of him.

He said the strangest part is that it took about two hours before the arithmetic in his head actually stopped running, and that when it stopped he noticed the noise it had been making.

You may run the same calculation. It might be money and it might be energy or time or capacity, and it starts the second an invitation appears and it finishes before you have decided anything. And it is not greed and it is not pride, it is the entirely reasonable arithmetic of somebody who does not have enough. And nobody has ever put you in front of a table where the calculation has nowhere to land.

The Invitation Says The Quiet Part Out Loud

There is an invitation in Isaiah that anticipates exactly this, and it does something almost nothing else in Scripture does, which is to name the problem in the invitation itself.

"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

He that hath no money.

That clause is in the invitation. It is not in a footnote and it is not a concession made afterwards to people who complained. The person with nothing is written into the address line, and then the terms are stated twice in the same sentence: without money, and without price.

You are named in the invitation rather than accommodated by it. Isaiah 55 writes the one with nothing into the guest list and then says the terms twice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and puts it in front of a man who has walked past a table eleven times.

And notice the strangeness of the verb. Come, buy. It uses the word for buying and then removes the buying from it in the same breath. That is not sloppy writing. It is deliberately taking the vocabulary of a trade and emptying it, so that a person whose whole relationship with invitations runs through arithmetic has the arithmetic taken away in the language they think in.

You have been given the terms in advance so the counting has nothing to do. That is what the written word does with the oldest invitation in the prophets, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that stop the noise in somebody's head at a trestle table.

Nothing Is Being Asked Of You Here

Now let this page do what it is describing, because a page about a free table that ends in a request would be a lie.

Nothing on this site asks you for anything. There is no figure anywhere in this article, no proportion, no percentage, no practice you have been enrolled in, no sign-up sheet, no membership, no next step and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

If money is tight for you right now, and it may well be, then nothing here is aimed at you sideways. There is no small amount being hinted at. There is no suggestion of giving time instead. There is no gentle observation about what people in your position often find helpful.

You are not the subject of this article. You are the person it is written to, and those are different.

You have nothing to settle and no one here is collecting. It is written that the gift of God is not of works, lest any man should boast, which removes the entire mechanism by which a person could be in debt for this, and His Spirit is the one who has been sitting with you through every calculation you have ever run in a street.

And you are as welcome today with nothing at all as you would be with everything, because that is what without price means when the words are read the way they are written, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from becoming the thing it is describing.