Keeping the Book for Everyone Else

The scorebox has a window that only opens if you lift it and pull it toward you at the same time, and a chair with one leg shorter than the other three, and a shelf that has held the same tin of pencils since about 1998.

Saturdays, half past one. He is up there before anybody else is changed, and he stays up there through both innings, and he does the book properly, in pencil, with the bowling analysis filled in over on the right where most people cannot be bothered. Twenty-two years of it. There are boxes of the old ones in the pavilion loft and if you wanted to know who took four wickets against the village down the road in 2011 he could find it for you inside two minutes.

People come and stand at the door. Somebody brings him a cup of tea at the interval. The young lads treat him with the particular affection young lads reserve for a man who has watched them all grow up.

He has never batted. Not once. Not a single innings in twenty-two years, and he was a decent player at nineteen and three or four people up there still remember it. They stopped asking about ten years back. Not unkindly. It became a thing about him, the way things do, and now it is simply that he keeps the book.

And the reason he keeps the book is not modesty. It is that something was done to him, a long time ago, by another person, and ever since he has known with total certainty that a record is something you keep for other people.

Sit down here with me, and let me be clear straight away. I am not going to ask you what it was. Not now, not later, not at the end of this. I will not ask you to say one word to a single human being, ever. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

The one place where Jesus stops and explains

There is a moment in Luke's Gospel that ought to be more famous than it is, and it is the moment where Jesus stops and tells you exactly what He thinks a long affliction is.

A woman comes into a synagogue on a sabbath. She has been bent over for eighteen years and cannot straighten up. He calls her over, He speaks to her, He puts His hands on her, and she stands up. And then the man who runs the building objects, on procedural grounds, because it is the wrong day.

And Jesus answers him, and in the answer He does three things in one sentence.

And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?Luke 13:16

First, He states who she is. A daughter of Abraham. He says it before anybody asks and without any qualification. Her standing is not under review and it never was.

Second, He names who did it. Whom Satan hath bound. An enemy did that to her. Not her own failure, not a lesson she needed, not a consequence she had earned. He puts the act with the one whose hands it belongs to, out loud, in public, in front of a room.

Third, He is angry, and He is angry at the men who cared more about the rules of the day than about a woman who had been bent for eighteen years.

You are bound by something an enemy did and you are not the author of it, and your standing was never the thing under question. I am not offering you my sympathy there. The written word puts the naming and the blaming in Christ's own mouth in that verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off the page and gets it into a man who has believed the opposite for twenty-two years.

He does not ask her a single question about herself

Look at what is missing from that story, because the absence is the sermon.

He does not ask her what she did. He does not ask how it started. He does not ask whether she has forgiven anybody, or whether she is ready, or whether she has told her family, or whether she has processed it properly. There is no interview. There is not one question put to that woman in the entire account.

He looks at a person who has been bent for a long time, He calls what happened to her by its right name, and He looses her.

If somebody has been handling you as a case to be examined, that is not where the Lord is standing. He is at the other end of the room, and He is annoyed on your behalf.

You are loosed by a Christ who never once asked you to account for what was done to you, and you were never handed an examination to pass. Scripture shows Him doing exactly that, in front of witnesses, on the wrong day of the week, and it is His Spirit who carries the manner of it and not only the fact of it.