It Came Out Of Somebody

The leisure center hall smells of floor polish and squash, and there are twelve reclining chairs where the badminton courts usually are, and she is in the fourth one along with her sleeve rolled up and her coat folded on her stomach.

It takes about nine minutes. The nurse is talking about her son's driving test. Somebody two chairs down is asking, again, whether it is all right to go swimming afterwards. And under the blanket on the little trolley beside her, quietly and without any drama at all, something that was in her body a moment ago is now in a bag.

That is the bit she cannot get past, and she has done this eleven times now. Not the needle. The transfer. Something that was hers, that was warm, that was keeping her alive, is going to leave this hall in a cool box and go into a person she will never meet, and it will keep them alive instead. No paperwork does that. You cannot achieve it with a signature. You cannot mean it hard enough for it to happen. Something has to actually come out of one body and go into another.

Afterwards, at the trestle table with the tea and the biscuits in the little packets, a man opposite her says he started coming after his wife had a bad delivery, and he says it the way people say things at that table, plainly, over a custard cream, and then he asks her why she comes. And she says, because when my dad was ill somebody I never met gave him four more months.

Four more months. Christmas, and one birthday, and the afternoon in the garden with the blanket.

Now hold that, because I want to put something beside it. You have used a word all your life, in prayers and in hymns and probably on a card you gave somebody, and I suspect if a friend asked you tonight what it actually means you would hear yourself starting three different sentences and finishing none of them. That is not ignorance and it is nothing to be embarrassed about; most of us were handed the word and never the picture. So let me give you the picture first, and we will name it afterwards.

What they used to do

Picture two men in the ancient world, standing in a field at the end of a long negotiation.

They do not shake hands. There is no clerk, no seal, no copy for each party. Instead an animal is brought out and killed, and it is done in front of both of them, deliberately, so that neither can afterwards pretend it was a conversation. Then the two of them speak, over the body of it, and what they are saying comes to something like this: my life is now standing behind these words, and if I break them, let what happened here happen to me.

That is the ceremony. Not an agreement between two minds. An exchange between two lives, with a death in the middle of it so that nobody could ever call it talk.

And here is the sentence in Scripture that names it in six words.

Gather to me my faithful ones, who made a covenant with me by sacrifice!Psalm 50:5

In the original it is even blunter. They did not make it. They cut it. It is not the language of paperwork at any point; it is the language of something that had to be opened up before the promise could stand.

So hear this over you before we go one line further. You are inside a thing of that kind, and it is Scripture that says so rather than my enthusiasm for the idea, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a fact like that off the page and puts it under your feet where you can stand on it.

Why it had to be blood and not ink

There is one more line, and it explains the whole strange business, and it is God's own explanation of His own arrangement.

For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls.Leviticus 17:11

The life is in the blood. That is why it is the currency of every covenant in the Bible and it is not squeamishness or superstition. Blood is simply the only thing in the world that carries a life out of one body and into a situation.

Which is exactly what the woman in the fourth chair could not get past. She has understood this since she was thirty-four and she has never once had the words for it. Something has to come out of somebody. Meaning it is not enough. Wanting it very much is not enough. A life has to leave a body and arrive somewhere else.

And then, in an upstairs room in Jerusalem, with the meal half eaten, a man picked up a cup and said the word out loud over it and told them plainly what it was and what was in it, and the next afternoon He did the thing the cup had described.

You are held inside that, right now, and the reason it holds is not the strength of your grasp on it: God bound Himself in what is written, and His Spirit is what makes an old ceremony in a field feel like the ground under a Tuesday.

What this does to the promises

Now go back and pick up any promise of God that has been traveling round with you.

Whatever it is. The one about never leaving you. The one about the peace that guards. The one written on a card and propped up somewhere, read four hundred times, which has come to feel like a kind thought from somebody who loves you.

Every one of those sits on this. They are not sentiments and they never were. They are the terms of something that was cut. Underneath the gentlest line in your Bible there is a body and a cost and a life that came out of somebody, and the promise is as heavy as the thing that ratified it.

That is what changes tonight. Not the wording of the promises. Their weight. You have been reading legal documents as get well cards, and nobody told you, and now somebody has.

You have been given the whole of it, and you did not know its name until about four minutes ago, and it has been holding all the same the entire time, because Scripture puts the strength on God's side of the arrangement and the Spirit of God is the seal on it rather than your understanding.