I Know What The Word Means

Yonatan can tell you what the verb means in the original and how it was used of dyeing cloth, and he has told people so at tables, and it is a genuinely useful thing to know.

He can walk you through what each of the main positions is and why, fairly, without weighting it, which is rarer than it sounds. People come to him with this. He is generous with it. He has sat with two different friends who were wrestling with it and helped both of them, and neither of them came away with his opinion, which he was quietly pleased about.

And he has never felt one thing about his own.

Not on the day. Not since. He was nineteen and he remembers thinking, in the water, with a clarity that has embarrassed him for twenty years: this is the part where something happens.

Nothing did. He came up, and he was interested, and he has been interested ever since.

That is the word he uses about himself when he is being honest, which is not often. Interested. He is the most well-informed man in his circle about a thing he has never felt.

And he has a private theory, which is that he was given the understanding instead. That the knowing is a consolation prize handed to people who do not get the other thing, and that everybody who has ever wept in a service got the real item while he got the manual.

He has never said that out loud. It would sound like self-pity and he is not a self-pitying man. It would also sound ungrateful, because the understanding is real and it has been useful to people.

But he thinks it. Most weeks.

You might know this one from the inside.

Maybe you are the person others come to. Maybe you can explain three positions on a thing that has never once moved you. And you have been carrying a quiet suspicion that you are on the wrong side of a distribution.

Where He actually puts the blessing

There is a moment at the end of John where Jesus says something that has been read to Thomas for two thousand years and is in fact addressed straight past him.

Thomas has just had it. The evidence, the invitation, the hands. He has the most sensory encounter anybody in that book gets.

And then Jesus says this.

Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.John 20:29

Read the direction of the sentence.

He does not rebuke Thomas, and He does not withdraw anything from him. But He takes the blessing and He points it somewhere else entirely, at a group of people who are not in the room, who will never have what Thomas has just had, and He calls them blessed.

That is not a consolation. Consolations are not what you say to a man who has just touched your hands.

And you are the one that sentence was aimed at. The written word puts the blessing on those who have not seen and yet believed, and it says it in a room where somebody had just seen, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man who has been dividing the world into people who felt it and people who read about it.

And what you carry is not a consolation prize. The word never once presents the not-seeing as second class, and the Spirit is the one who lets that reach somebody who has quietly filed himself under runner-up for twenty years.

The category error underneath

Now let me name the actual mistake, because I think you will appreciate having it named precisely.

You have been treating experience and understanding as two grades of the same currency, with experience as the higher denomination.

They are not two grades of anything. They are different faculties doing different work, and both of them are downstream of a thing neither one produces.

Watch: the man who wept in the service did not generate the reality of his baptism by weeping. His weeping was a response to something that was already the case. And your interest at nineteen was also a response to something that was already the case, in a differently wired man, and neither response constituted the case.

The case was made elsewhere by somebody else.

And what happened in you at nineteen was not measured by your response to it. The word describes baptism as being buried and raised with Him, which are things done to a person rather than felt by them, and the Spirit is the one who makes a passive verb feel like ground.

And you are not standing on the far side of a distribution. The word says there is one body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and it does not sort the body by how strongly its members felt anything, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than issuing a rank.

And the understanding is not a booby prize either

One more thing, and then I will let you go and turn a tap on.

You have been faintly apologetic about the very thing you have been given.

Two friends came to you. You sat with both of them. Neither came away carrying your opinion, and you were pleased about that, and you should have been, because that is a rare and disciplined kind of help and most people cannot do it.

That is not the manual. That is ministry, and it is being done by a man who thinks he is holding a leaflet.

And what was given to you was given for other people. The word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal, and the Spirit is the one who makes a gift feel like a gift rather than a compensation.