The Offering He Could Not Grade

My uncle graded fruit for forty years and he could do it with his hands behind his back.

He would walk a row of crates in the early market, before anybody else was properly awake, and he would take one out of the middle, never off the top, and turn it once, and put it back. First. Second. Not for sale. He did not agonize. It took him a second and a half a crate and he was right almost every time, and the growers trusted him, which in that trade is everything.

And there is a man in the same market, three stalls along, who has been trying to grade something for two years and cannot.

He is trying to grade his own sorrow.

Here is exactly what he does, and it will be familiar to you. Something happened, and he is sorry about it, or he thinks he is. And then, because he is honest, he asks himself a second question: sorry about what, exactly? Sorry that it was wrong, or sorry that it came out? Sorry about the harm, or sorry about how it has made the last two years feel? And once he starts turning it over the way you turn a fig in the light, he cannot tell. The two are wound together and they do not come apart.

So he holds it up. He turns it. He looks for the mark that would tell him this is first grade sorrow and not the other kind. And he cannot find it, because there is no mark, because a heart is not a fig.

And here is what that leaves him doing at half past five in the morning with the awnings still down. He will not bring it to God, because he does not know whether what he has is the real thing, and he has an idea somewhere that offering God a second grade sorrow would be worse than offering nothing.

Two years of standing at his own stall holding something up to the light.

That is you with your hands full.

You've been trying to certify your own motive. Not out of pride, out of honesty, which is the cruel part. And there is no test available, because you are the instrument and the sample at the same time, and nobody can weigh a thing while standing on the scale.

He names the one offering He will not despise

David is at the lowest point of his life and he says something about what God actually wants that would have shocked the people around him, because they were a people who knew exactly what an acceptable offering looked like.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.Psalm 51:17

Now read that as a specification, because that is what it is.

Every other offering in that world had standards. Unblemished. Of a certain age. Without spot. Anybody bringing one knew it could be turned down at the gate, and inspectors existed for exactly that purpose.

And here is God, through David, naming the one offering with no such standard attached. A broken spirit. Not a broken spirit of a particular grade. Not contrition of a certified purity. Broken, and contrite, and the promise attached is stated in the negative, which is deliberate: thou wilt not despise.

You are holding the one thing in the whole of Scripture that God has committed in advance not to turn away, and I am not lowering the bar to comfort you: Psalm 51:17 puts the promise in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can bring it to a man grading his own heart at dawn.

Notice what the negative form does. God does not say He will be pleased with it, or delighted, or that He will grade it highly. He says He will not despise it. That is precisely the fear of a person like you: not that God would be indifferent, but that He would look at what you brought and find it cheap. And that specific outcome is the one He rules out by name.

You have brought something that cannot be refused at the gate, and there is no inspector standing at it, which is written into the verse rather than being my kindness to you, with the Spirit of God able to open a hand that has been holding a fig to the light for two years.

Here is what I want to add, because in my family hospitality has rules and one of them explains this perfectly. When somebody arrives at the door with something in their hands, you do not examine it. You take it. The taking is not a judgement on the gift; it is a statement about the guest. To hold a person's offering up to the light on the doorstep would shame them, and no house I was raised in would do it.

God is a better host than my grandmother, and my grandmother would have taken your figs without looking at them.

This is received as it comes, in the mixed state it is actually in, without the grading you cannot perform, because Scripture names the broken and contrite heart specifically, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a market street before the awnings go up.