The Tray He Would Not Let Anyone Touch

The workshop is one long room over a shop, and it has the particular smell of oil and brass and old paper, and a sound that is really the absence of sound with about nine ticking things in it.

Daniel has been here fourteen months. He is twenty-two. He came in able to do nothing at all and can now, on a good afternoon, clean and reassemble a simple movement without swearing, which Mr Feld describes as progress.

At the far end of the main bench there is a tray.

It is a shallow wooden tray with a glass cover, and inside it, laid out on green baize in a pattern, are the parts of one movement. Wheels, a barrel, plates, screws grouped in little turned brass cups. It has been there since before Daniel arrived. It does not move. Nobody wipes down that end of the bench. On his second week he lifted the cover, purely to look, and Mr Feld, from across the room, without turning round, said, Daniel, and that was the whole conversation.

He has understood it ever since the way any twenty-two-year-old would understand it. That tray is above him. That tray is for the man who has done this for fifty-one years, and it is not for the boy who still cannot fit a balance staff without holding his breath. Kept back. Kept away. Kept from him.

And the word holy has always worked in Daniel exactly the same way.

He was raised near it. He knows the shape of the word. And every time he has met it, in a reading, on a wall, in the mouth of somebody who meant well, it has arrived as a partition. Holy is the part of the room you do not go into. Holy is people who are not like you, in a category you cannot enter, at a distance you were not going to close. He is not angry about it. He has simply arranged his understanding of God the way he has arranged his understanding of that bench: there is a far end, and it is not his end.

This afternoon Mr Feld comes past with tea and sees where the boy is looking, and stops.

It is a longcase movement, he says. Eighteen forties, nothing special, it belongs to a family in the next street. It came in in a shoebox. Somebody had taken it apart and lost the order and put it in a shoebox in nineteen seventy something and left it forty years.

He taps the glass with one finger.

It is covered so nothing walks off. It is separated so the whole thing can go back together. It is not being kept from you, Daniel. It is being kept for the clock.

You have looked down that bench. Your far end is a different far end. But you know the word arriving as a partition, and you know which side of it you have quietly agreed to stand on.

The purest setting apart in the whole Bible is aimed at people

There is one place in Scripture where a person says the words I sanctify myself, and it is Jesus, on the last night, praying out loud where His friends can hear Him. And the reason He gives is the thing I want in your hands.

And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.John 17:19

For their sakes. Read it before you read anything else in the sentence. The one perfectly holy person who ever lived, describing His own setting apart, gives the reason first, and the reason is other people.

That single clause takes the whole partition apart. If holiness were fundamentally distance, then the holiest act in the record would be the most withdrawn one, and it is not. It is the most directed one. He sets Himself apart on purpose, entirely, toward them.

You were never being kept away from, and what you called a partition was a dedication pointed at you. That is the written word and not a comfort I have built out of a workshop, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence from a prayer prayed out loud on a last night and lays it on a bench under a lamp.

And then the second half, which tells you what the setting apart was for. That they also might be sanctified. His is the source of theirs. He does not set Himself apart instead of them. He sets Himself apart so that the same thing arrives in them, which means the movement of it is entirely toward people and never away.

A tray is covered so nothing walks off and separated so the whole thing can go back together. That is not a small illustration. That is exactly the grammar of the verse.

The setting apart travels by a word

Two verses earlier in the same prayer He says what the means is. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.

Through the truth. That is the road it comes down. Not through a wall, not through an achievement, not through a category you have to be admitted into. Through a word, and a word is a thing that is given to somebody. You cannot hand a person a partition. You can hand a person a sentence.

You have been handed the sentence, and it is already yours, and it came down a road and not up a wall. John 17 says through the truth in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who was promised in that very conversation is the one carrying it into a room with nine ticking things in it.

Now let me guard this properly, because the language of holiness as separation is not wrong and I am not deleting it. Set apart does mean separated, genuinely, and there are things a set apart life is separated from, and Scripture does not blush about that. But separation in Scripture is always separation for. The tray is separated so the clock runs. Jesus is separated for their sakes. The moment separation becomes an end in itself it has stopped describing anything God ever did, and it has started describing a partition that He never built.

And the people who handed you the word as a wall were mostly handed it that way themselves. This is not a case against anybody at the far end of anybody's bench. It is one clause in one prayer: for their sakes.