The Cup He Did Not Take Back

He was on one knee because the priest had asked them to kneel, and his trousers were new and too tight at the knee, and that is what he was thinking about for the first minute.

Then he was not thinking about that. He was looking at the side of her face, at the veil and the small hairs at her temple and the way her jaw was set because she was trying not to cry, and something went through him that he has never been able to explain to anybody, and he said it inside himself, and then, because it did not feel like enough inside himself, he said it under his breath.

God, every night. I will pray with her every night of our lives. Every single night.

Fourteen years.

Not once. Not on the first night, when they were tired and laughing. Not on the night the first one was born and he sat in a corridor at four in the morning. Not on the night of the diagnosis and not on the night it turned out to be nothing.

He says grace at meals. He goes to Mass. He is, by any measure his mother would use, a good man. And he has not once done the thing he knelt down and promised, and he has never told his wife that he promised it, and every night when the house goes quiet there is a small ordinary moment where he could and does not, and then the moment passes and the day is over.

He thinks it lapsed. That is the word he would use if he could be got to say anything at all about it. Something lapsed, the way an insurance lapses when you stop noticing the letters, quietly and without anybody announcing it, and now it is gone and there is no reinstating a thing that lapsed.

You may know that word from the inside. Not broken. Lapsed. And a lapsed thing feels worse than a broken one, because nobody even had to break it.

Where the covenant was actually cut

I want to take you to a table, on a night when a promise really was broken, and show you what was said over the cup.

It is the night before He dies. Everybody in that room is about to fail Him, and He knows it, and He says so out loud to their faces before the meal is over. And in the middle of that room full of men who are hours from proving unreliable, He picks up a cup.

Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.Luke 22:20

You are held inside a covenant that was cut in front of witnesses who were hours from failing, and it was designed that way. Luke 22:20 has Him naming the cup on the night He was handed over, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that table set for fourteen years.

He said it to the ones who were about to fail

Sit in the timing of it, because the timing is the message.

He does not wait until after the resurrection, when they have been restored and are behaving well. He does not say, I will make this covenant with whichever of you holds up. He says it over a table where one man is already arranging the betrayal and another is about to swear he never knew Him, and He calls the cup the new covenant in His blood, and He hands it to them.

That is not sentiment. That is a legal act performed at the worst possible moment on purpose, so that nobody afterward could believe the covenant rested on the character of the men receiving it.

You are held inside a covenant that was cut in front of witnesses who were hours from failing, and it was designed that way. Luke 22:20 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of an upper room and sets it down beside a man kneeling at his own wedding fourteen years ago.

And notice the direction of the blood. Which is shed for you. Not: which you must match. The covenant is cut on His side. In the old way of doing this, the parties walked between the pieces and both sides bled. Here one side bleeds and the other side is handed a cup and told to drink.

You have been given the cup and never once asked to bleed for the arrangement. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is what shed for you means in a covenant sentence, and the Spirit of God has been holding that cup out for fourteen years of nights that ended in silence.

A covenant does not lapse

Now let me say the honest half, because this category has terms in it and I am not going to hide them.

There are real things in the covenant for you. Come to the table. Turn. Walk. Love the woman asleep next to you. Pray with her, in fact, if you want to know what I think. Those are terms and God means them, and your choices are not decoration in this house.

But nothing you do or fail to do makes a covenant lapse, because lapsing is what happens to a policy that depends on a payment. A policy lapses because your money is what keeps it in force. That is the whole mechanism.

This one is not held in force by anything you pay in. It was cut in blood by the one who is still alive and still holding the cup, and there is no mechanism by which fourteen years of quiet evenings could cancel it, because there is nothing to keep up.

You are in a covenant that has no lapse provision in it anywhere. Scripture puts the whole force of it in His blood and none of it in our regularity, and His Spirit is the one who has kept that true through every night the house went quiet.