Throughout Scripture, the image of the feast keeps returning — a table set, a door flung open, a host who insists. This sonnet sits with that image, and with the strange truth at its center: that the One who provides the meal is also the One who came looking for us.
The Sonnet
The table has been ready longer than We knew. The wine was poured before our birth, The bread was broken when the world began, A place was kept for every soul on earth. The Host does not require the worthy guest, Nor count the merits of the ones who come, He bids the weary traveler to rest, And calls the wandering and the lost ones home. I had imagined I must earn my chair, Must prove some better self before I sat, But grace had set my name already there, And love had thought of all the things I lacked. So I sit down, no longer to refuse, And taste the welcome I had failed to choose.
Reflection
The hardest thing about grace is not believing in it — it is letting it be enough. We come to the table half-convinced we should have prepared more, accomplished more, become more. We rehearse our worthiness in the doorway. And the Host, every time, simply says: come and eat.
The gospel turns the usual order of things upside down. Most welcomes in this world are earned by suitability, by belonging, by the good fortune of the right invitation. The Kingdom welcome is earned by none of these. It is offered to the very people who never expected to be welcomed at all — the tax collectors, the sinners, the doubting, the road-weary, the latecomers. Which is to say: us.
The table is set. The chair has your name on it. You do not have to be ready. You only have to come.
