The wedding supper

The hall is full and the doors are still opening. Tables run the length of the room, and they are groaning, platters of roasted meat, bread torn warm, jars of aged wine going round, more than anyone could finish in a week. Somewhere a fiddle starts. There is laughter that does not stop, the loud, helpless kind, and over by the far wall two people who were separated for years are holding each other and weeping into the noise, and no one minds. This is the picture Scripture reaches for when it tries to show the end of all things, and it is worth noticing what it is not. It is not a courtroom. It is not a ledger spread open, not an examination you sit in dread of. It is a wedding supper, and an angel says the strangest, kindest thing over it: blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Isaiah saw the same table centuries earlier, a feast of rich food and well-aged wine spread on God's mountain for all peoples. After everything this book has walked through, let that settle. The story does not end at a bench of judgment. It ends at a feast, and your name is on the list of guests.

After a long season of scarcity and grief, you may brace for the end the way you brace for bad news, expecting a reckoning, a courtroom, an examination you are sure you would fail. Hear what Scripture actually puts at the end instead. A wedding supper. Rich food and aged wine, music, laughter, the long-separated folded back into each other's arms, and your name written on the guest list. Blessed, the angel says, are those invited to the supper of the Lamb. This changes what you are walking toward. You are not headed for an audit of your worst years. You are headed for a celebration, and you were invited not because your record earned it but because the Host wanted you there. There is a table being set right now that you cannot see, a chair with your name on it, a feast prepared by Someone who is glad you are coming. You are allowed to look forward to joy. Not joy you must manufacture, not joy you have to deserve first, but joy already prepared, waiting for you to arrive.