The Coat He Was Still Wearing

Bus shelter, about six, cold and clear and the sky doing that thing it does in January where it is beautiful and unbearable at the same time.

There was somebody in it.

Not asleep. Sitting, upright, with their arms in and their chin down, doing the thing you do when it is going through you.

And he had his coat on. The good one. The only one. He has had it eleven years and it is the reason he is warm walking to a job that starts at half past six, and there is not another one in the flat, and if he gave it away he would be walking to that job tomorrow without it.

He knows that is a real fact and not an excuse. He has run it about four hundred times since and it is still a real fact.

He kept walking.

He did not slow down. He did not say anything. He did not think, at the time, about the coat at all, because he did not get as far as thinking about the coat. He got as far as noticing and then his legs kept going and he was forty yards past before anything arrived in him at all.

Two weeks.

And he has been arguing with himself for two weeks and getting nowhere, because he keeps arriving at the coat, and the coat is unanswerable, and the argument stops there and then starts again the next day at about the same place.

If you have walked past somebody and then argued with yourself about it for weeks without landing anywhere, you know that shelter. And you know that the argument is not about the coat, because you never got as far as the coat.

The word, and then a list with nothing grand on it

Let me walk the last forty yards with you and say the plain thing.

The problem is not the coat. You are right about the coat. Nobody is asking a man with one coat to hand it over and walk to a half past six start in January without it, and anybody who tells you otherwise has more than one coat.

The problem is the argument, which is not about the coat and has never once been about the coat, and which you have been running for two weeks because it is a comfortable argument that you always win.

So let me put the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean having something to give. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. It was on you on that sidewalk in January and it is on you now.

Now the list, and I want you to look at what is actually on it.

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.Matthew 25:35-36

Six items. Read them.

Food. A drink. Taking somebody in. Clothing. Visiting. Going to somebody.

Two of those six require you to own something. Four of them require you to be present.

Visited me. Came unto me. Took me in. Those are not purchases. Those are a body arriving somewhere.

You have four of the six items on that list available to you without owning a thing. Matthew 25:36 puts visiting and coming unto in the same list as clothing and feeding without ranking them, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in a person arriving somewhere rather than in what they can afford to hand over.

What was actually available at six o'clock

So let us go back to that shelter, and let us be exact, because you have been imprecise for two weeks in a way that has protected you.

You could not give the coat. Correct. Settled. Do not revisit it.

Here is what was in that shelter at six o'clock that did not cost a coat.

Stopping. Just stopping, physically, which is the entire content of the Samaritan story and which is the four items on that list.

Asking. Two words. Are you all right, or, worse and more useful: do you want me to call somebody.

Calling somebody. There is a number for exactly that situation in most places and it takes ninety seconds and you have a phone.

The gloves. You mentioned the coat four hundred times and you have never once mentioned that you were wearing gloves.

You had four things in that shelter that did not require you to own anything, and the argument you have been winning was about the one thing that did. Matthew 25 lists visiting and coming alongside the giving, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who makes a person notice a shelter from forty yards back rather than walk past unaware.

And I want to be plain about the noticing, because it is the part you keep skipping.

You noticed. From inside a good coat, at six in the morning, going to a job that starts at half past six, in January, you saw a person and you registered exactly what was happening to them, and you have thought about it every day since.

Most people did not see them. Genuinely. Most people who walked past that shelter that morning did not register a human being at all.

You are somebody who sees, and the two weeks is the proof of it rather than the accusation. Matthew 25:37 has the righteous ask when did we see thee, which means they did not know they were seeing, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives that noticing to a person before they have worked out what to do with it.

When the people in the story found out

Now the strangest thing in that passage, which nobody points at, and it is the thing that takes the weight off you.

Both groups are surprised.

The righteous say: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, and feed thee? They have no idea. They are not being commended for a thing they knew they were doing. They did not keep a list and they cannot remember the occasions.

And the other group is equally surprised in the other direction.

Which means the whole passage is about people who did not know at the time.

So the man in the shelter was not a test you failed. That framing has been running under your two weeks and it is not what that chapter is doing. Nobody in it is being tested and everybody in it is astonished.

You were not being examined at that shelter, and everybody in that chapter is surprised by what they did or did not do. Matthew 25:37 has the righteous asking when, which is a question you only ask if you were not keeping score, and it is the Holy Spirit who works in a person without their ever running a tally.

And nothing comes back to you for any of it. There is no credit for what you do tomorrow and no debit outstanding from January. That whole chapter is about people who had no account and were not keeping one, and if you start one now you have left the passage entirely.

I do not know what happened to the person in that shelter. Neither do you. That is genuinely hard and I am not going to make it easier by inventing an outcome.