The Whole Family Heard Me Say It

There were about forty of them in that courtyard and it was the end of a long evening and somebody had said something that opened a door, and he stood up.

He is not a man who stands up. That is the thing his cousins would tell you. He is the one who fills the plates and refills the glasses and says almost nothing all night, and on that evening, for reasons he has never fully understood, he got to his feet with a glass of water in his hand and told the whole family what he was giving to God.

He named it. He was specific. He said what he would stop and what he would start and what this house would be from now on.

And his uncle, who is the oldest man on that side and who had been quiet all evening, said one sentence to him afterward at the gate, and put his hand on the back of his neck while he said it, and that sentence is the thing he thinks about at four in the morning.

He did none of it.

Not some of it badly. None of it, and within about two months, and there was no drama and no crisis, and the following spring the whole family met again and he sat there and passed the plates and nobody said a word about any of it, and that was somehow the loudest thing that has ever happened to him.

Five years. He has not been to a family table since. He sends things. He is generous at a distance in the way that men are when they cannot be present. Weddings he attends for an hour. And the reason, the whole reason, is one old man who put a hand on the back of his neck at a gate.

You may have a room like that. And it may not be the room. It may be one face in it, and you may have arranged five years of your life around not seeing it.

The most public humiliation in history

Now let me take you to a sentence in Hebrews, and I want you to sit on one word in it.

The writer is telling a tired congregation to keep going, and he points them at Jesus, and he describes what Jesus did with the cross. And the thing he singles out is not the pain.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.Hebrews 12:2

You are able to walk through a room without letting the room set the price. Hebrews 12:2 says He endured the cross despising the shame, which means He thought it beneath consideration, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has settled your standing for five years.

Despising the shame

Crucifixion was designed as a public humiliation. That was its function. The Romans were not primarily interested in causing pain, they had faster ways of killing people; they were interested in making an example, on a road, at eye level, outside a city, with a sign explaining the charge.

And the writer says He endured the cross, despising the shame. The word for despising there does not mean He hated it. It means He thought little of it. He treated it as beneath consideration, as not the relevant fact, as a thing of no weight compared to what was actually going on.

That is not denial. He knew exactly what was happening and to whom, in front of whom. He simply refused to let the watching crowd set the value of the transaction.

You are able to walk through a room without letting the room price you. Hebrews 12:2 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a letter to a tired congregation and stands it at a gate with an old man's hand on your neck.

Now let me be careful, because in a family like yours shame is not a private feeling, it is a social fact, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

You are right that something happened in that courtyard. You stood up in front of forty people who love you and named what you would do and then did not do it, and in a family that keeps its word, that is a real event with real weight.

But look at where you have put the weight. You have put it in an old man's face. And an old man's face, however much you love him, is not the scale on which this is measured, and it never was, and giving it that authority is not humility, it is a category error that has cost you five years of a table you belong at.

You are weighed by the one you gave your word to, and He is not sitting at that gate. Scripture puts the shame of the cross under the feet of the one enduring it, and His Spirit has been the one settling your standing through five years of you being generous at a distance.

What his uncle probably meant

And now let me say a thing I cannot prove and will name as such, because I would rather be honest than clever.

You have never told anybody what your uncle said. You think about it at four in the morning. And in five years of turning it over, the sentence has almost certainly changed in your keeping, the way sentences do when they are stored in shame: they get harder, and shorter, and the hand on the neck gets heavier.

I do not know what he meant. Neither do you, not any more.

What I do know is that this article is not going to instruct you to go and find out, because your standing does not depend on it. If you go and see him, let it be because you want to see an old man before he dies, not because a verdict is outstanding. There is no verdict outstanding.

You are settled with God this evening, and no human being has been given a vote in it. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is the plain force of the shame being despised and the seat being taken at the right hand, and the Spirit of God is the one who did the settling.