You Were Far Off

The wall went up before anybody now living was born, and nobody remembers why.

It runs straight down the middle of a courtyard that was one courtyard once. On the far side is everything: the well, the fig tree, and the long table under it where that family does its whole life. Births get announced at that table. Arguments happen there. At festivals they put boards across trestles and it seats twenty-two.

On the near side there is a strip of ground, a door, and a line of washing.

The girl on the near side grew up with the sound of it coming through the stone. Not the words, the shape. She knew the rhythm of a family eating. She knew the particular noise of plates being carried out and the noise of plates being carried back, and the difference between them. She knew what it sounds like when a name gets called across a courtyard at dusk and somebody answers, and she knew the pause afterwards, which is the sound of people who assume they will see each other tomorrow.

Nobody on that side was cruel to her. That is what makes it so hard to explain to anyone. There was no incident. There was a wall, and there was history, and the history was not hers, and by the time she was old enough to ask about it the answer was already that is just how it has always been.

So she made a rule for herself, the way people do. Not a bitter one. A practical one, and she made it at about eleven years old and has never once said it out loud: family things are for family. Not for the girl on the other side of the wall. Not for someone who came to it late.

And you have your own version of that rule.

Maybe you came to faith at thirty-eight and everyone in your row was carried in as a baby. Maybe you married into a family and you have been in it eleven years and you still ask before you open a cupboard. Maybe you joined the church, and you are welcome, genuinely welcome, and the welcome itself is the problem, because welcome is what you extend to a guest.

You are not asking for pity and you would be embarrassed if anybody thought you were. You just quietly do the arithmetic every time something family shaped happens, and the arithmetic always comes out the same: they were born inside it, and I got here late, and latecomers do not get the family things.

Come and watch a king, then. This particular one has a limp to explain.

A man carried in expecting a sentence

Soldiers arrive at a house a long way out in the country, where a young man has been living quietly for years. He cannot walk. He was dropped as a small child while a household was fleeing and both his feet were injured, and he has lived out of sight ever since.

They come for him. Nobody tells him why. He is carried into a hall he has never seen, in front of a king whose house replaced his own family's house, and he does the only sensible thing a man in his position can do: he puts his face on the floor and waits for it.

And the king says his name. Then the king says, do not be afraid. Then the king gives the reason, and the reason has nothing to do with him at all.

And David said unto him, Fear not: for I will surely shew thee kindness for Jonathan thy father's sake, and will restore thee all the land of Saul thy father; and thou shalt eat bread at my table continually.2 Samuel 9:7

For Jonathan's sake.

Not because the young man was promising. Not because somebody put in a word for him. Not because the king was in a generous mood that week. Years before, on a hillside, two men had sworn an oath to each other, and one of them was dead, and the oath was not. The king is not being nice in that hall. He is being faithful. His own honor is the thing on the table, and seating that man is how his honor gets seen.

Take that in, because it is the exact opposite of charity. A charity case is somebody the room can feel good about. This is a king whose word would be worth nothing if that chair stayed empty.

You were brought in on the same terms, and you were never the beneficiary of somebody's good mood. Scripture puts the reason in a name that is not yours, and the Holy Spirit takes that hall and sets you in it, not as an exception anyone made, but as the visible proof that God keeps what He swears.

The distance was closed by blood, not by lineage

Now hold that hall beside a sentence written to a city full of people who knew exactly what a dividing wall was.

But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.Ephesians 2:13

Were far off. Are made nigh. Two states, one past, one present, and the thing that moved between them is named, and it is not effort and it is not ancestry.

That word far is not an insult in that verse and it was never a description of your worth. It is a measurement of distance, and distance is exactly the sort of thing that can be closed by somebody else. You did not walk in from the far country. You were brought.

So the rule you made at eleven has been quietly repealed and nobody told you. What is written says the distance is already closed, past tense, done at a cost that was not yours, and the Spirit of God is not waiting for you to feel like family before He treats you as one.

Nobody at that table got there on lineage

Here is the part that finishes the arithmetic off, and you have to be willing to look at the people you keep comparing yourself with.

They are there for exactly the reason you would be.

The woman who has been in that pew since 1974 is not there on seniority. The family who seem to have been born inside all of it are not inside it on lineage. Every single person at that long table under the fig tree is seated for the sake of Another, and the ones who have been there longest are usually the quickest to say so.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

No more strangers. That is a legal sentence, not a compliment.

And you are in that household on the same footing as everyone in it, which means the comparison you have been running for years was never measuring anything real. Ephesians 2:19 is written in the plainest words the language has, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a legal fact and makes it feel like a kitchen you can walk into without knocking.