Still Holding Her Coat

She has been in the corridor for eleven minutes.

Inside the room there are maybe a hundred people and they are singing, and the sound comes through the double doors in a way that makes the doors themselves feel warm. She knows the song. She knows the second half of the bridge, which most people get wrong, and she can hear that most of them are getting it wrong.

She has her coat over her arm. She took it off in the car park, which was optimistic, and she has been holding it ever since, and holding a coat is a very specific posture. It says: I have not decided.

What she is actually doing in that corridor, if you could see it, is arithmetic.

Four years. She has been out four years, and in that time there were things she did and things she stopped doing and a stretch in the middle she genuinely cannot account for. And somewhere in her, without anyone teaching it to her in a sentence, she has arrived at a figure. Not money. A figure of a different kind. So many months of showing up before she counts as back. So much visible seriousness before she stops being somebody with a story. A period of being quiet in the back row, keeping her opinions to herself, before she is allowed to open her mouth in a room like this again.

She is not bitter about it. That is the thing that would surprise you. She thinks the figure is fair. She would tell you, if you asked her in the corridor, that of course there has to be something, that you cannot just walk back in.

And the doors are unlocked. They have been unlocked all evening. The people on the other side of them are singing the bridge wrong and would be delighted to see her.

That is you in the corridor with your coat over your arm.

You are not standing there because the door is shut. You're standing there because you have worked out a price, and you're trying to establish whether you have paid enough of it yet to be allowed in without embarrassment. And nobody in the building set that price. Nobody. You did the sums yourself, in the dark, using a rate somebody in your past charged you for something else entirely.

Abundantly is the word He used

Isaiah is talking to people in exile who know exactly what they cost. Watch how the sentence ends, because everything is in the last three words.

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.Isaiah 55:7

Abundantly pardon. In the Hebrew it is doubled: He will multiply to pardon. Pardon upon pardon, heaped, more than the situation requires.

Now hold that against a corridor. Abundance is not a word you use about a settlement. Nobody abundantly settles an invoice. You settle an invoice exactly, to the penny, and the exactness is the point of it. Abundance is a word for something else entirely, something given past the requirement, and it is the word God chose for what happens when a person turns round.

You are not standing in front of a bill, and the figure you calculated has no creditor. I did not soften that for you: Isaiah 55:7 says pardon multiplied, and it is the Holy Spirit and not the volume of this sentence who takes that off the page and puts it in the room where you are actually standing.

Here is what the arithmetic has been doing to you. It has made your return conditional on your own performance, which means the whole thing rests on you, which means it will never be finished, because there is no month in which a person doing that arithmetic concludes that the account is clear. The figure moves. It always moves. Four years becomes five, and the price of five is higher than the price of four, and the coat stays over the arm.

Pardon does not work like that. Pardon is not a discount on a debt. Pardon is the account closed by somebody with the authority to close it, and there is no version of a closed account where you keep making payments into it.

You have been carrying a coat you were never asked to hold, and that is written into the verse rather than being a kind thing I thought of, with the Spirit of God able to open your fingers where a good argument could not.

I want to be careful here, because there is a way of hearing this that turns it into nothing. Isaiah does not say the way and the thoughts do not matter. He says forsake them, and He says return. There is a turn in the verse and it is a real one. What He does not do, anywhere in the sentence, is put a tariff on it. The turn is the whole of what is asked, and the abundance is what meets it.

So the four years are not a debt being serviced. They are four years, and they are grieved, and they are over.

You are welcome tonight at exactly the level you would be welcome after twenty years of good behavior, because Isaiah 55:7 makes the pardon abundant rather than proportional, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that liveable rather than merely true.

And notice who the verse says to return to. Our God. Not the committee. Not the room. The turn is toward a person, and the person has already published His policy.