The Plainest Sentence

It has been eleven weeks and she still has not said anything in the Thursday group.

She goes. She has not missed one. She makes the tea in the interval and she is the person who notices when somebody is not right and rings them on the Friday, and everybody in that room would tell you she is the warmest one in it and they would be correct.

She just does not talk any more.

What happened was this, and it took about nine seconds. They were on a passage and the question came round the circle and it got to her, and she said what she thought, which was that it seems to her it means Jesus came for us and He loves us and He is not going to let go of anybody He has taken hold of.

And there was a small silence.

Not a rude one. Nobody sighed. Nobody rolled their eyes and she would fight you if you said they did. It was a pause of about a second and a half, the kind that happens when a room has to change gear, and then a lovely man called Peter said yes, absolutely, and of course the verb there in the Greek carries the sense of a completed action with continuing effect, which does open up rather a lot, and off they went.

He was not being unkind. He was building on what she said. He would be horrified, genuinely horrified, if he knew.

But she went home and stood at the sink doing the washing up in the half dark without putting the light on, and what she was thinking, in a loop, was that what she said had been a bit of the meal that gets taken away, and what he said had been the actual food.

And she had a thought that she has not said to a living soul, which is that after fifty one years of it, she may not actually have very much. That everybody else in that circle has a structure and she has a feeling. That if you pressed her hard she could not defend one thing, and that the sentence she gave the room was, in the end, what a child would say.

Then on the Sunday her grandson was in the kitchen kicking his heels against the chair leg and he asked her, out of nowhere, in the way they do, who Jesus is.

And she said the same sentence. Word for word, near enough.

And he did not say anything either. But it was a completely different silence, and she felt the difference in her chest before she understood it, and she has been trying to work out ever since what it was.

He asked for a sentence

There is a moment in the Gospels where Jesus does the thing she has been dreading in that circle for eleven weeks. He goes round the group and asks a direct question, out loud, in front of everybody, with nowhere to hide.

He asks who people say He is, and they give Him the room's opinions, which is easy, and then He turns it.

He said to them, But who do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered and said, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus answered him, Truly joyful are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.Matthew 16, verses 15 to 17

Count the words in the answer. It stands written exactly that short, and His Spirit is the one who put it in the man who said it.

That is the whole thing. No structure, no defense, no development, no qualifying clause, no reference to anything. A fisherman with wet feet says one short sentence out loud, and it is the highest point anybody reaches in that entire Gospel before the resurrection.

And look at what Jesus says about it, because it is not what anybody expects.

He does not say well put. He does not commend the phrasing, the insight, the theological precision or the courage. He says flesh and blood did not tell you that. He says the only reason those words came out of that mouth is that the Father in heaven put them there, and that is the whole of the commendation, and it has nothing at all to do with how the sentence was constructed.

Which means the thing that made Peter's confession the best moment in the room was not its quality.

It was its origin.

Now hear this carefully, because there is a way of taking that which would be false and I am not going to let it stand. Depth is not the enemy here. The man who wrote most of the New Testament could argue for nine chapters without drawing breath. The people in that Thursday circle with the long words are not showing off, they are carrying something real that cost them years, and the ecosystem of the church would be poorer by an enormous amount without them, and Peter with his lovely mind and his Greek verbs is not the problem in this story.

There has never been anything wrong with more words. The only thing that has ever gone wrong is when more words got quietly mistaken for more faith, and everybody in the room, including the ones with the long words, would tell you that is nonsense the second you said it out loud.

But nobody says it out loud. And so a woman stands at a sink in the dark thinking she has a feeling and everybody else has the real thing.

Here is what she actually has.

She has the same confession Peter made, in the same number of words, about the same person, and it got into her by the same route, which is that the Father put it there, and there is no other route. Nobody has ever reasoned their way to that sentence. Everyone who holds it holds it as a gift, the professor and the grandmother identically, and the professor knows that better than anybody.

The difference between her sentence and Peter's sentence in that room was never depth. It was vocabulary. And vocabulary is a tool for carrying a thing, not the thing, and a plain bowl and a decorated bowl can be carrying exactly the same water.

That is why the silence in the kitchen felt different. Because in the kitchen, nobody was measuring the bowl. A boy asked a real question and got a real answer and the answer landed and went in, and it went in because it was true, and it was short enough for him to carry it upstairs.