What He Could That Day

Three in the afternoon in a room that smells of vinyl and hand gel, with parallel bars along one wall and a poster about shoulders that nobody has read since 2019.

Ari is at the table with a peg board and a tub of putty and eleven weeks behind him.

He is fifty-one. He was a joiner for thirty years, and before you picture a big man, he is not: he is wiry and precise and his whole trade lived in his hands. Fine work. Mortise and tenon. A man who could feel a sixteenth of an inch through a plane.

Now he has a grip strength number.

It gets written on a sheet twice a week. The therapist, who is about twenty-six and unbothered by his moods, writes it down and says something encouraging and moves on to the next thing, and Ari has watched that number for eleven weeks the way a man watches a horizon.

Today she does the test, writes it down, and says, without any particular ceremony: that is up two from Tuesday.

And Ari says: that is nothing.

He does not say it bitterly. He says it as a plain statement of fact, because it is one, in the system he is using. Two units on a scale where he used to be off the top of the page is nothing. It rounds to nothing. It is inside the error.

And she says, not looking up from the sheet, in exactly the same tone she says everything:

It is what you could do today.

Then she goes to get the next thing off the shelf.

Ari sits there with his hand on a peg board.

Because he has a measure, and he has had it his whole working life, and it is a good one for a trade and it is the reason he was worth hiring. What a hand is worth is what it can do. That is not vanity; it is how a craftsman thinks and he would defend it in a workshop.

The trouble is that he has been applying it to God for eleven weeks. What he has to offer is what he can produce. And what he can produce is a peg board and a number that is up two.

You have that measure. Yours might come from a different trade or no trade at all. But you know the scale you grade yourself on, and you know what it says about you this year.

He said it out loud, in a room doing arithmetic

There is a scene near the end of Mark where a woman comes into a house with something precious and pours the whole of it over Jesus, and the room objects. They think it is waste. They say so, out loud, in front of her, and Mark says they murmured against her.

And Jesus answers them, and this is the sentence.

She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.Mark 14:8

She hath done what she could.

That is a measure, and He states it in a room where everybody else is using a different one. They are working in scale: how much, compared to what else could have come of it. He answers in capacity: what was available to her, and whether she brought it.

You are measured by what you could, and it is written down as His own defense of somebody in a room that was grading them. That is the written word and not my sympathy across a table, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence spoken in a house in Bethany and lays it on a peg board at three in the afternoon.

Notice that He does not tell her she did a large thing. He does not argue the room's arithmetic on the room's terms and He does not inflate what she did. He simply changes the instrument, in public, and the new instrument reads: this is what she had, and she brought it.

And notice what she actually did, because for a man in a physiotherapy room this is not a detail. She anointed a body. The whole scene is one person's hands on another person's body. It is not an idea, an intention or a sentiment; it is a physical act done with hands at the limit of what one person could do in an afternoon.

And that is the thing He made permanent

Read the next verse, because Jesus attaches something to that act that He attaches to almost nothing else in the gospels.

Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.

Wherever this is told. For a memorial.

Of all the things He could have made permanent, He picked an act that the room had just called a waste, done with two hands, by somebody working at the very top of what she was capable of, and He said: this goes with it, everywhere, forever.

This is yours, and the thing He made permanent was a physical act at the limit of one person's capacity, and it is already settled. Mark 14 puts the memorial on it in His own words, and the same Spirit who moved that woman across the room is the one making it a present fact in a man with his hand on a board.

Now let me guard this properly, with the precision this deserves.

I am not telling you that the number does not matter. It matters. Get it up. Do the work, twice a week, in a room you would rather not be in, and let the young woman with the sheet do her job, because that is a good and worthy thing and there is nothing more spiritual about resignation.

And I am not making you a promise about that hand. Nothing here is a prediction about where the number gets to. That is not mine to say and I will not say it.

What I am telling you is that you have been running a workshop measure on the wrong material. In a trade, what a hand is worth is what it can do, and that is right. Before God, the measure He used out loud, in defense of somebody being graded by everybody else in the room, was what she could.

Which is a measure with no top of the page. You cannot fail it by being at two units up from Tuesday, and you could not have passed it more thoroughly at thirty with a plane in your hand.