Four Qualifiers On The Stairs

The lift has been out since March, so everything is going up the stairs, and it is the hottest Saturday of the year.

He was only crossing the lobby. That is how it starts. A woman with a van outside and a hand truck she does not know how to work, and one of those looks people give a stranger when they have run out of options and pride at roughly the same moment. So now he has a box in his arms and he is on the second flight, and the box is heavy in the particular way that only a box of plates is heavy.

They stop on the third landing to breathe. There is a bike chained to the rail that has been chained to the rail longer than anyone in this building has been alive. Somebody two doors down is frying onions with the door open. She puts her end down and stretches her back and says the flat is lovely, and the last place was lovely too, and she liked it there because there was a little church on the corner and the bells were the only clock she needed.

Then, not making a thing of it, the way you ask about a bus route:

"Are you a believer, then?"

And here is what comes out of his mouth. Not the two words. Four things first, in a rush, like a man emptying his pockets at a gate.

Not in the way you probably mean.

I was, seriously, for a lot of years, but that whole world and me had a falling out.

I would not use the word I used to use about myself, honestly.

It is complicated, and I am not going to bore you with it on a landing.

And then, at the end, quietly, almost as an afterthought, the only part of it that was actually an answer.

"But yes. I believe."

She says "That is nice", because she is a normal person carrying plates on a hot day, and she picks up her end, and they go up the last flight talking about whether the window in the back room opens.

He goes down again to the van. And on the way down, on his own in the stairwell, he counts them off on the fingers of one hand, because he heard himself do it and he cannot un-hear it now. One. Two. Three. Four.

Four apologies stacked on the front of a two word answer. Four sandbags in front of a door that was not under attack.

She had asked him a simple question in a stairwell on a Saturday. He had answered it like a man in a hearing.

Five words, and nobody asked him to expand

There is a man in the gospel of John who spent eight days saying the loudest version of no in the New Testament. Unless I see the print of the nails, unless I put my hand there, I will not believe. He said it to friends. He said it to their faces, more than once, for over a week.

Then the doors are shut and Jesus is standing in the room and He speaks to Thomas by name and offers him His hands.

And Thomas, who had a whole speech ready, who had rehearsed his objections for eight days the way you rehearse yours in the shower, says five words.

And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.John 20:28

That is the highest confession anybody makes about Jesus in the entire gospel, and it is five words long, and it has nothing in front of it.

No preamble. No context for the last eight days. No "look, obviously, I have been difficult about this". He does not manage the room. He does not explain his history to the other ten men standing there who had watched him be impossible all week. He says the true thing and he stops.

You are allowed to answer that plainly, and the permission is not mine to give or to withhold. Romans 10:9 puts the confessing mouth and the believing heart side by side and asks for nothing between them, and Scripture says plainly that no one calls Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit, so the breath under those two words on the landing was His before it was yours. The short answer was legal ground before you ever got nervous about it.

Now, why the qualifiers come out first. This is worth seeing clearly, because it is not cowardice, whatever you called yourself on the way down those stairs.

Every one of those four sentences was addressed to somebody who was not on the landing.

The first one was for the people who would hear the word and picture something that is not you. The second was for the room you left, in case it is listening. The third was for the version of yourself who used that word easily and made it mean things you can no longer make it mean. The fourth was for the whole argument, all of it, the entire four year weight of the thing, which was going up those stairs alongside the plates.

She asked about you. You answered on behalf of a committee.

You have permission to stop doing that. His word says the Lord knows them that are His, in 2 Timothy 2:19, and that stamp does not get clearer when you add a paragraph to it, and it is His Spirit and not your framing that keeps it legible. You are not the defense attorney for your own faith. There is no case being brought in that stairwell.

Here is the line that matters, and I want it exactly right, because the easy version of this message is a lie.

The short answer is enough. It is not complete.

Those are two different words and only one of them is being claimed. Thomas said five words in that room and then spent the rest of his life on the road with them, and there was more to learn on the day he died than on the day he said it. Nothing here is telling you that what you believe about Him does not matter, or that study is for people who have not grown up yet, or that having thought hard about God was your mistake. It was not your mistake. Keep going. Read more, not less.

But nobody in a stairwell, on a Saturday, holding one end of a box of plates, was ever asking for the complete thing. The question on that landing was whether you believe. That has an answer, it fits in your mouth, and it fitted there before the argument started.