You Have Been Studying It From Outside

The reading room is on the second floor and the window is open because of the heat.

Esme has the desk under it, which she chose eleven years ago and has never given up, because the light is good and because of what happens in the square below on an afternoon like this one. They have carried the tables out of the houses and put them end to end down the middle of the street. There is a fiddle going and somebody keeping time on the back of a chair. An old man is dancing with a small child on his hip, badly, and everyone is shouting at him about it.

On the desk in front of her are three notebooks about that exact celebration.

She knows it better than they do. She knows the order of it, older than any of them realize, when the bread goes round and why it goes to the youngest first, what the toast is a shortened form of, which family brings the salt. If the woman in the yellow apron down there got the order wrong, Esme would notice from up here.

She has never been to one.

It is not that she was excluded. Nobody has ever kept her out of anything. It is that a person who studies a thing has a place to stand, and that place is at the window, and over eleven years the window has stopped being where she works and started being who she is.

Then feet on the stairs. The boy from the corner house, out of breath and impatient with her the way children are with adults who are slow.

They are asking for you, he says. They have set a place.

And Esme hears herself say it before she can stop it. Oh, no. No, no. I only study it.

She hears it. That is the moment. She hears the sentence come out of her own mouth and she knows exactly how it would sound to anybody standing in that street, and her hand is already reaching for the notebook, because the notebook is what she takes with her into rooms so that she has a reason to be in them.

The boy waits in the doorway.

And you are up here too, are you not.

You know more about the covenants than most of the people singing downstairs. You could correct a sermon. You have read this on your phone in a queue and in your car outside work and at two in the morning, and you have understood every word of it, and understanding has become the place you stand.

And the thought of stepping in, out loud, tonight, without any more preparation, feels faintly like breaking a rule.

Nobody put that rule there. Let us go and look at where it came from.

Outside is a real address, and it has a past tense

Paul writes a sentence to people who had spent their whole lives outside all of this, and he does not soften it.

That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.Ephesians 2:12

Strangers from the covenants of promise. That is your window seat, described exactly, and he does not pretend it was a fine place to be.

But look at how he dates it. At that time. He is not telling them where they live. He is telling them where they used to live, and the very next sentence moves them: but now, in Christ Jesus, ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.

Made nigh. It has already happened to them in the grammar. Nobody in that letter is being told to work their way in; they are being told, in the past tense, that the distance was closed by blood while they were still describing themselves as outsiders.

So take this from the window where you are sitting. You were brought near, and it is already done, and it was not done by the quality of your understanding: Ephesians 2:13 puts the bringing near in the past tense and puts the blood of Christ underneath it, and the Holy Spirit is not offering you that as an interesting construction. He is telling you which side of the glass you are actually on.

Nobody in that street qualified either

Here is what the window does to a person. It makes you think there is an examination.

There is not one. Look down at the street in the parable and pick anybody. The old man dancing badly did not pass anything. The woman in the yellow apron got the order wrong and is inside it. The child who received the bread first understood the least of anybody there and was served first on purpose.

That is not an accident of the picture; it is the shape of every covenant in Scripture. Abraham was asleep in the grass while the fire walked. A man who could not walk was carried into a king's hall and given a place at the table for somebody else's sake. The seventy four elders climbed a mountain and ate in the presence of God without one of them being able to explain why they were still breathing.

You are not the only one there without credentials. You are the only one still holding a notebook, and His word never once made comprehension the door. The Spirit has been standing at your elbow through all eleven years of your reading, and He is the One nudging you toward the stairs now.

The rule you think you would be breaking

Let me name it, because it is real, and I am not going to pretend you invented it out of nothing.

Studying is safe. A person at the window cannot be corrected, cannot be caught out, cannot be told they do not belong, because they never claimed to. The moment you step down into the street and take a place at the table, somebody can claim you. Somebody might look up. Somebody might ask a question you cannot answer with a footnote.

So you made a rule out of respect, and the rule sounds like reverence, and it works like a lock. It says: people who really belong feel something I do not feel, or have a certainty I do not have, or know the moment they came in, and until I have that, going in would be presumption.

That rule is not in Scripture anywhere. It is not in the covenant with Abraham, who was unconscious. It is not in Ephesians 2:12, where the far off are brought near before anybody consults them. You are inside on the same terms as everyone else, which is the blood and the Name and nothing whatsoever about your qualification, and the Holy Spirit does not require you to feel a thing tonight in order to make that true.