The Feast Where God Wipes Every Face

Isaiah had already seen a green shoot
push up out of a dead stump.
But when he looked out over Jerusalem,
he saw how much was still dead.
Enemy armies were marching closer.
There were new graves outside every town,
and in every street someone was crying.

Then God showed Isaiah Mount Zion,
the mountain Jerusalem stood on,
and on top of the mountain, a table.

"On this mountain," Isaiah sang,
"the LORD will make a feast
for all the peoples of the earth."

All of them.
People from the hot countries and the cold ones,
from the islands and the deserts,
people who had never once heard God's name.

And the food!
Meat so rich it melts on your tongue,
bones full of marrow,
(marrow is the soft, rich middle of a bone,
and in Isaiah's day it was a treat for kings)
and the finest wine,
kept and kept for years until it was just right.
(Nobody at this table has to finish their vegetables first.)

But over all those guests
hung something dark.
Isaiah called it a covering,
a cloth spread over every nation,
the way a cloth is laid over the face
of someone who has died.

Its name was death.
It had covered every family that ever lived.
No king had ever lifted it,
and no army had ever cut it.

"He will swallow up that covering," Isaiah sang.
"He will swallow up death forever."

Death had swallowed everyone.
Now God swallows death,
GULP,
and it is gone for good.

Then the Lord GOD goes from guest to guest,
from face to face,
and with his own hand he wipes the tears away:
a mother's tears beside a grave,
a soldier's tears far from home,
the tears of every guest at that long table,
until no face is wet.
And every cruel thing the nations ever said about his people,
he takes that away too.

"The LORD has spoken," sang Isaiah.
And when the LORD speaks, it happens.

Then the guests look up from their plates
and start to shout:

"Look! This is our God!
We waited for him, and he saved us!
This is the LORD! We waited and waited!
Now let's be glad and sing,
because he has saved us!"

Isaiah never sat at that table.
He grew old, and he died,
and the dark cloth stayed where it was.
Hundreds of years went by,
and God's people kept saying, "We are waiting."

Then another guest came to Israel's tables.
At a wedding he turned water into the best wine.
He stood at his friend's grave and cried real tears.
He was killed on a cross,
and they laid him in a tomb
with a cloth over his face.

On the third day his friends found the tomb empty.
The face cloth lay folded by itself.
He did not need it anymore,
because he was alive.

The night before he died,
he had lifted a cup and said
he would not drink wine again
until he drank it new in his Father's kingdom.
So the feast on the mountain is still coming,
and the one who will go from face to face,
the one who cried at his friend's grave, is Jesus.