The Shelf They Cleared for the Cellos

The storage room behind the school hall smells of dust and rosin and the inside of an old piano, and on the Tuesday before the festival Mrs Okoro props the door open with a fire extinguisher and says, right, we are clearing the bottom shelf.

There are four of them in there doing it. Old team pinnies, a box of recorders with no mouthpieces, a bag of Christmas tinsel from a year nobody can name. Out it all comes. And when the shelf is bare, and wiped, and drying, Mrs Okoro takes a strip of masking tape and a marker and writes three words on it and presses it along the front edge, and the three words are FOR THE CELLOS.

There are no cellos. That is the part that catches. The cellos are coming on Thursday, three of them, on loan from the district music program for the festival, and they have not left the van yet. They have not been unpacked, or tuned, or played, or even seen. And the shelf is already theirs, already emptied, already labeled, already off limits to the recorders and the tinsel and everybody's gym bags, and it will stay that way whether the cellos turn out to be beautiful or scratched.

Aleena is on the floor with the tinsel bag in her lap, and something goes very quiet in her.

She is fifteen and she has been graded her whole life. Reading levels since she was five. A number for effort and a number for attainment on every report that has ever come through the front door. Second violin, third desk, which is a grade too, because everybody in an orchestra knows exactly where they sit. She is not bitter about any of it. She has simply never once encountered a good thing that was not scored first, and so when she sits in the back row of assembly and hears a verse read out with the word holy in it, the machinery in her does what it always does. Holy is the top band. She has never been in the top band. Therefore the word is about other people, said kindly, over her head.

And here is a shelf that was cleared before anything arrived.

You are on the floor of that storage room with her. Your report card was a different shape, maybe, or there was no report card at all. But you know the sound of a good word coming toward you with a number attached, and you know how fast you can work out that the number is not yours.

Sinai comes before the commandments

Here is where the word gets used for the first time over a whole people, and I want you to notice what has and has not happened yet at the moment God says it.

Israel has been out of Egypt for three months. They have not received a single commandment. There is no law, no tabernacle, no priesthood, no offering, no track record, and nothing whatsoever in the column marked achievement. They have complained about the water twice. And God calls Moses up the mountain and gives him a sentence to carry back down.

And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.Exodus 19:6

Read the verse just above it and you will see what the sentence rests on: I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself. Brought you unto myself. That is the whole qualification, and every verb in it is His.

You have been set apart, and it happened to you the way that shelf happened to the cellos, before you had played a note. That is the written word and not my good opinion of you, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence spoken at a mountain and lays it along the front edge of your actual life this evening.

The order matters more here than almost anything else. The commandments arrive in chapter twenty. The holy nation is announced in chapter nineteen. God did not say, keep these and I will make you holy. He said, you are a holy nation, and now here is how a holy nation lives. Every list you were ever handed had that order backwards, and it is not a small mistake, because a person trying to earn a status they already hold will work themselves to nothing and never once feel like they have arrived.

What the word means, and what it never meant

The word behind holy, all through the Old Testament, means set apart. Marked off. Designated for one use and not another. It is used of a day, of a pot, of a room, of a mountain, of a bowl for the temple that is no better made than the bowl in the kitchen and is simply not for the kitchen.

Which is why nobody in Scripture ever asks how holy something is. You cannot ask it. There is no scale to ask it on. A thing is either designated or it is not, and the designating is done by the one who owns it. Grades rank. Designations assign. You have spent your life being ranked, and then you met a word that assigns, and you filed it under the only system you had.

You are His, the assigning is finished, and there is no band above the one you are standing in. Exodus 19 says a holy nation, and the same Spirit who spoke it at that mountain is the one making it a present fact in a school cupboard, or a car, or wherever your feet actually are while you read this.

Now let me guard something, because there is a way of hearing this that would be worse than the grades. I am not telling you that holiness is casual or that it does not matter how you live. It matters enormously. I am telling you it was never a scale you were climbing, and taking away the scale does not leave you with a smaller version of the same thing. It leaves you with a boundary drawn by God, which is heavier than any bar, and which He carries. The shelf is not a lower expectation than the top band. It is a different kind of thing altogether, and it holds.

And the people who handed you the scale are not on trial here. A good many of them were carrying it themselves and it was crushing them too. This is not about them. This is about the tape on the front edge, and whose handwriting is on it.