Three Weeks Late and No Fine

She has the coins in her hand before she is through the door. She counted them in the car. She counted them twice, because she was not entirely sure whether it was six pence a day or ten, and she wanted enough either way, and she has a bit extra in the other pocket in case.

Three weeks over. It is a hardback about the Norfolk coast that she has renewed twice and read eleven pages of, and it has been on the side by the kettle looking at her since the second week of the month.

The young man on the desk takes it, does the thing with the scanner, and says thanks, that is all done for you.

She stands there. She says, sorry, it is quite late.

He says oh, we do not do fines any more, we stopped that a couple of years back. And he smiles and turns to reshelve it, and there is a woman behind her waiting with three picture books and a tote bag, and it is over, and it is a Tuesday morning, and nothing at all has happened.

She goes out into the car park with a pound and twenty pence in her fist and no idea what to do with any of it.

If you know that feeling, come and sit down here with me, because I want to be careful. Something was done to you, a long time ago, by another person. You have been living braced for a charge ever since, and somewhere along the way you decided that the reason nobody has ever brought one is simply that nobody knows.

I am not going to ask you what it was. Not here, not later, not at the end of this. I am not going to ask you to tell a single human being anything, ever. Nothing in this message wants the thing itself, and nothing in it ever will.

Somebody saw the whole thing

Here is the sentence I want to hand you, and I want you to take your time with it.

You are not uncharged because nobody knows. You are uncharged because Somebody saw the whole thing and read it correctly.

Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: the poor committeth himself unto thee; thou art the helper of the fatherless.Psalm 10:14

Thou hast seen it. That is the whole psalm turning on its hinge. The writer has spent thirteen verses describing a man who does what he wants to people who cannot stop him and gets away with it, and who says in his heart that God will never see. And then the psalmist turns and says, flatly: You have seen it.

Not You will look into it. Not You have heard a version of it. Seen. Present. The whole thing, from the inside, with every detail in the right place and every hand attached to the right person.

You are known by a God who watched the whole of it and did not need your account of it, and you were never depending on being believed. I am not offering you comfort there. That is what the written word says in as many words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page and puts it down in a woman standing in a car park with coins in her fist.

The account is open, and it is not open against you

Now, that verse says something else and I am not going to skip it, because skipping it is how this gets soft.

It says God beholds mischief and spite to requite it with thy hand. There is an account. It is real, it is God's, and it will be settled by Him and not by you, and that is a mercy on both counts: you will never have to carry the settling, and you will never have to wonder whether it was noticed.

And the account is not open against you. It has never been open against you. An act belongs to the person whose hands did it, and God arranged the moral universe that way on purpose, so that nobody could ever be charged with somebody else's doing. Scripture says the soul that sins is the one that bears it, that a son does not carry his father's guilt and a father does not carry his son's.

You are the one this psalm calls the poor and the fatherless, and you have God Himself standing as your helper. That is what the written word puts plainly in the same verse, and His Spirit is the one who makes a legal fact into something a person can lean their weight on.