Twelve Hours and the Small of His Back

Ten past six in the morning at the rank by the station, and there are four of them nose to tail with the windows down and the engines off, and the light is just coming up over the roofs behind the bus stop.

Sami has been in that seat since six o'clock last night.

He does not get out immediately. He has a routine for the last five minutes of a shift and it goes like this: seat all the way back, both hands off the wheel, breathe, and wait for the moment when he can straighten up without saying anything out loud.

Twelve hours. The small of his back is a fact of his life the way a road is a fact. It is not an injury and no doctor has ever been very interested in it. It is simply what happens to a man who sits for twelve hours a night for nineteen years.

He is forty-three. He prays three times a day and he has done since he was a boy and he means it.

And here is the thing he has never once noticed about his own praying, and it took a man in the next cab to make him notice it.

His back never appears. In nineteen years of prayer, his body has come up exactly once as a subject, and that once is a whole category and not an exception: he apologizes for it. When he is too tired to concentrate, he apologizes. When his back is bad enough that he cannot hold still, he apologizes. His body enters his prayers only ever as an interruption, the way a phone going off enters a conversation.

Everything else is welcome. His children are welcome. His mother is welcome. The man on the second floor who is not well is welcome. The whole world of things he carries comes in.

The part of him that carries all of it stands outside and says sorry for making a noise.

This morning the driver in front of him, an older man who has known Sami since Sami was twenty-four, gets out to stretch and says something about his own knees and then, quite casually, that his wife made him read something last night and there was a line in it he cannot stop thinking about.

He says: a body hast thou prepared me.

Then he gets his flask off the roof of the car and asks if Sami wants any.

You have that pattern. Yours may not be a back. But you know which part of you enters your prayers only as an apology, and you have never once asked why it is the only part that has to say sorry for being there.

What He said God actually wanted

Hebrews 10 quotes a psalm and puts it in the mouth of Christ at the moment of the incarnation, which is to say at the moment of arrival, and what He says is not what anybody would expect.

Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me.Hebrews 10:5

Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not. That is the whole system of the old covenant being set to one side in half a sentence, and the writer is not being disrespectful; he is saying that all of it was pointing at something.

And then: but a body hast thou prepared me.

That is the something. Not a better intention. Not a purer sentiment. Not a more sincere inward state. A body, prepared by God, given to the Son, and received by Him as the thing to be offered.

You have a body, and Scripture puts that word in the mouth of Christ as the thing God prepared. That is the written word and not my consolation at a taxi rank, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm quoted in a letter and lays it in a seat pushed all the way back at ten past six.

Sit with the verb. Prepared. It is a making word, a getting-ready word. Somebody worked on it. The body in that sentence is not a container that turned up around a soul; it is described as something God got ready on purpose, for a purpose, and handed over.

The sanctifying came down a road that ran through a back

Now go five verses on in the same chapter, because the writer does not leave it as a beautiful line.

By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

Through the offering of the body. That is the mechanism of your entire standing before God. Not through a decision made in a heavenly council with nothing physical about it. Through a body: feet that walked between towns in dust, hands that got tired, a back that carried a beam up a road, a body that slept in a boat because it needed to.

The whole of your holiness came to you down a road that ran through somebody's actual muscles.

You are sanctified through a body, and it is already done, once for all. Hebrews 10 says the offering of the body of Jesus Christ in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who was upon Him without measure is the one making it a present fact in a man who cannot straighten up yet.

So the idea that your body is the part of the arrangement God is not interested in has a serious problem, and the problem is the middle of the gospel.

Let me guard this, because there is a wrong way to preach it into a tired man's cab.

I am not telling you that the ache is good, or that God arranged your back, or that there is a lesson in it you have been failing to learn. That is a thing people say to men like you and it is not in this passage anywhere and I am not going to say it. Some of you are in genuine pain this morning and I am not going to dress it up.

And I am not telling you that a body which cannot do what it used to do is less prepared. Hebrews does not say a strong body or a working body. It says a body, and the one being described in that verse ended up broken on purpose, which ought to settle the question of whether a body has to be in good order to be the offering.

What I am telling you is that the part of you that has only ever come to God as an apology was named by Christ as the thing God prepared, and that puts it inside the conversation and not outside it, permanently.