DINING WITH OUR ENEMIES
14/03/2025
For years I have been drawn to that little phrase in Psalm 23 where David writes in verse 5:
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
It might be suggested that this is when one's enemies are all gathered to watch what God is giving you. You get a chance to smirk at them. They didn't get their way. You won in the end.
I don't like this interpretation.
I am thinking that this is about the reconciliation that happens on our journey home to full redemption. In the latter days you will share a banquet with those who opposed you, those who hurt you. Grace will have its outworking. Forgiveness is not just a transaction, it is friendships restored and enjoying the fulness of God's great salvation history together.
It reminds me too of the 13th century Rumi's poem, Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing. He writes,
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there
My two friends Martyn Joseph and Martin Wroe used Rumi's idea in their song There Is A Field:
There is a field
I'll meet you there
Somewhere bеyond this
Just out of sight
All those we miss
Are hеld in some new light
Lie down in the deep grass
Lie down every soul
In a field where love welcomes you
In a place where we're made whole
I first came across this field in Colum McCann’s novel Apeirogon and then found out that it was an idea that the late Northern Irish and Nobel Peace laureate John Hume loved. For them it is a place of reconciliation.
It is where my imagination goes when I think of dining with our enemies.
If you have been reading my blogs this Lent then you will know that I have been surmising and practicing the idea of praying for people we do not love. We are not long in to Lent but I have already had a moment when I have had almost a Psalm 23 moment. Oh, enemy is too strong a word but someone who has been the face of deep hurt crossed my path. I had been praying for them in Lent, which had softened painful barbs.
We then met. It was all very ordinary but for me very profound. It was a release of enmity. Through the encounter I am convinced that one of God's intentions in his work within us is restored relationships. God wants us to dine with our enemies. He longs for us to meet in that field beyond right and wrong. Shalom really does lie there.