I Brought It to Him as a Sin

The last of them goes down the stairs at half past nine. He hears the street door pull shut, and the little shudder it always gives, and he does not follow.

The room they borrow on Thursday evenings sits above a shuttered workshop, and it holds a long table, eleven mismatched chairs, and two oil lamps that somebody's grandmother sent over years ago because the ceiling light is unkind. The table is still laid. There is bread under a cloth, a bowl of olives with the pits pushed to one side, a pot of soup with the ladle standing in it, and a plate somebody covered with a saucer before they left, because that plate is his and they always cover it. They eat first in that room. Then they talk. That is the order, and it has been the order for as long as he has been coming.

He waits until the stairwell goes quiet. Then he crosses to the far end of the room, away from the lamps, and he kneels at one of the folding chairs with his elbows on the seat, and he takes out of his coat pocket a folded square of paper.

He writes it down every week so that he can name it accurately. That is the kind of man he is. He does not want to confess a vague thing and get a vague absolution; he wants to say the actual word, the actual want, out loud in the dark, so it is properly dealt with. So the paper has the same handwriting on it seven Thursdays running, and it is the same want every time.

I am not going to tell you what he wanted. If I name it, you will hold your own up beside his and start doing arithmetic, deciding whether yours is more reasonable than his or more shameful than his, and that arithmetic is exactly the thing this page is trying to get you out of. It is enough that it was real. It was the thing he reaches for when the room goes quiet. It came once, years ago, in part, and the reaching started again before the month was out, and he has never told anybody about that, not once, not even the people who cover his plate.

So he kneels and he says it. Forgive me, I wanted it again. He says it the way a man reports a relapse. He says the word from the paper. He asks to be given a smaller heart, or a quieter one, or one that does not lean forward so hard, and when he cannot think of anything else to ask for he asks to be made grateful, because grateful sounds like the opposite of whatever this is.

Then he folds the paper, and he puts it back in his coat, and he stands up with his knees complaining, and he walks the length of the room to the door.

Past the table. Past the bread under the cloth and the soup with the ladle still standing in it and the plate with the saucer over it that somebody covered for him with their own hands before they went home.

He turns the lamps down and he goes out into the street, hungry, and he thinks that is what honesty costs.

Perhaps that is you on a Thursday. You have carried your appetite up a flight of stairs every week for years and laid it in front of God as evidence against yourself, and then gone home past a table you never once sat down at, because kneeling felt like the honest part and eating felt like the indulgence.

He has been confessing the wrong thing

I want to say the true thing early, because most people who arrive at this page have had the opposite said to them gently by somebody who loved them.

Confession is a good and holy road, and it is the wrong road for this. Confession is for the thing you did. What that man is carrying up the stairs is not a thing he did. It is a capacity. It is the size of the room inside him, and he has been apologizing for the size of the room every Thursday for seven weeks, and no absolution has ever landed, because there was never anything there to absolve.

You have been bringing Him the one thing He actually invited you to bring. I am not being kind to you. The written word puts the invitation in the plainest terms it has, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line set down two thousand years ago and stands it in front of a man kneeling at a folding chair as though the line had been waiting for him.

Listen to what Jesus called Himself, and notice what He did not call Himself.

I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.John 6:51

Bread. Not a verdict. Not a mirror. Not a physician's note about the disordered wanting of the crowd in front of Him, and He had every reason to write one, because that crowd had followed Him across a lake for a second free meal and He knew it and said so out loud. He knew exactly what they were hungry for, and how mixed it was, and how quickly it would restart. He answered them by naming Himself the food.

You are hungry, and hunger has never been the charge against you. John 6:51 is not a rebuke aimed at an appetite; it is a man saying, I am what the appetite is for. And the Holy Spirit does not whisper greedy over somebody who is starving. That whisper has another author entirely.

Bread is an answer, and an answer is not a scolding

Here is where the confusion begins, and it is an honest confusion, so I will not treat you as though you were slow for landing in it.

Somewhere along the way, hunger and greed got welded together, and once they are welded you cannot bring the one to God without dragging the other in behind it. So the appetite goes to the confession, because that is where guilty things go, and the table stands there with the ladle in the soup, week after week, unvisited.

You were built with a capacity, and the capacity is not the accusation. Scripture never once treats a hungry man as a problem to be corrected. It treats him as a man to be fed, and it says so from the first pages to the last, and the Spirit who moved those writers is not embarrassed by what you have been embarrassed to say out loud.

Look at how He handles it in practice. He does not tell the crowd on the far shore to want less. He does not suggest they moderate. He tells them they are chasing food that spoils, and then He hands them food that does not, which is not a smaller offer than the one they came for. It is a larger one. Every time God meets a hunger in Scripture, He enlarges the offer rather than shrinking the appetite.

You are welcome to bring the whole of it, and the whole of it is not too much for this table. Psalm 107:9 says He satisfies the longing soul and fills the hungry soul with goodness, and the same Spirit who moved a writer to set down the word longing is not now standing over you with a pen, crossing it out.

And I will be honest with you about the part nobody says. The wanting may come back. It came back for that man before the month was out, and it may come back for you before the week is. What is settled is not that the reaching stops. What is settled is that the bread came down, that it is on the table tonight, and that no evening you sit down at it is wasted because a Tuesday is coming.