The Bar I Cannot Get Past

The altos come in a beat late at bar forty and the whole thing folds up like a deckchair, and the conductor lifts both hands and laughs, and says the thing he says every Thursday.

Forgive yourselves. It is gone. From the top.

The hall smells of floor polish and the radiator by the piano ticks. Forty people in loose rows on plastic chairs, music folders open, the tall windows going gold at the top where the last of the light is, and the piano has a key in the middle that sticks and the pianist has learned to lean round it. She stands in the second row of the altos, folder up, and she finds the top of the page with everybody else, and she does not sing the first line, because the sentence has gone into her the way it goes into her every week and comes out somewhere else.

Forgive yourselves. Everybody says it. Her sister says it, kindly, over the phone. A woman at church said it with a hand on her arm. A book said it, in a chapter heading. Eight years now since the thing that everybody who knows about it stopped mentioning long ago, and she has done what a believer does: she took it to God, in the plain words she had, and she believes He forgave her, and she would say so under oath. And every one of those kind people looks at her and can see that something is not finished, and every one of them reaches for the same sentence, and she nods, and she has never once been able to work out what it means. Forgive yourself. As if there were a second pardon, in a smaller hand, that she was supposed to sign and keeps not signing.

The altos come in on time this pass and the sound opens up under the roof, forty voices, and she is singing now with the rest of them, and under the singing there is a bar in her own life that she cannot get past, and no conductor has ever told her how.

Maybe you know a bar like that. You believe He forgave you. You would say so under oath. And a well meant sentence keeps arriving from people who love you, forgive yourself, and it lands like a task you cannot find the handle of, and you have started to suspect that not being able to do it is one more thing on the list.

The pardon does not need your countersignature

I want to take that sentence apart gently, because the people who say it mean well and because it is not in the Book. Forgive yourself. Search Scripture for it and you will not find it once, and I think that is not an accident.

Here is the pit, named. Not the thing itself, which is yours and God's and I am not asking you to describe it to me or to anybody. The pit is the loop after it: you received the pardon, and then a second court opened, in you, and it has been sitting for eight years. You are the accused in it. You are also the prosecutor, and the clerk, and the one who reopens the file on Thursdays, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who convened it. And because you cannot make the loop stop, you have concluded that there is a step you are failing to take, some second act of forgiveness aimed at yourself, and until you manage it the case is not really over.

I am telling you plainly: there is no second pardon. There was one pardon, and Scripture knows only one, given by the only One with the standing to give it, and it did not come back to you for a signature. What you have is not an unfinished transaction. It is a court that never had jurisdiction, still in session.

Listen to Paul, who had more on his record than most of us and knew it.

But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.1 Corinthians 4:3-4

I do not even judge myself. Read that as a man who once held the coats at a stoning and later wrote it down for the whole church to read. He does not say he has forgiven himself. He does not say he has finished feeling it. He says something stranger and freer than either: he has stepped down from the bench. It is the Lord who judges me. One Judge. Not Paul.

You are not the judge in your own case, and the case is not yours to reopen. I am not handing you a technique; I am reading you what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence Paul wrote to Corinth and speaks it into an alto row on a Thursday, to you, by name.

What the higher court already did

Now the ground under all of it, because I never want you to think this rests on Paul's temperament or mine.

Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died, more than that, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.Romans 8:33-34

Who shall bring any charge. That is a question shouted into a courtroom, and it is meant to be answered by silence. If God has justified, there is nobody left in the building with the standing to charge, and that includes the one person you have never thought to include: you. It is written that He casts our sins into the depths of the sea. Not the shallows, where a diligent woman with a folder could wade in on a Thursday and pull one back up for review. The depths.

You have been justified by the only court that has jurisdiction, and the ruling has already been handed down. God's word says who justifies, and it is God, and it is His Spirit who carries a finished ruling into a heart that keeps convening a hearing about it.

And hear this, because it is where the sentence everybody says goes wrong. When you cannot forgive yourself, it feels like humility. It feels like taking it seriously. But look at what it actually does: it sets up a court above God's court and holds a case He has closed. That is not humility. It is a woman standing on a bench that belongs to Someone else, and I do not say that to shame you, because you climbed up there in grief and nobody showed you the way down. I am saying it so you can see that the way down is not one more act of forgiveness. It is stepping off.

You are released from the job of judging yourself, and it was never a job you were given. It is written that it is the Lord who judges, and the Holy Spirit is not asking for a second signature; He is asking you to come down.

The one who does not judge himself

I said Paul had more on his record than most of us. Think for a moment about what he does with it. He does not pretend it did not happen. He tells it, more than once, in his own letters, in the first person, the persecutor and the blasphemer and the least of the apostles. And in the same breath he says by the grace of God I am what I am. He carries the record and he does not carry the case. Both at once. The fact of what he did stays true, and the ruling on it belongs to God, and Paul is a free man walking around with a true story and no gavel.

That is the posture I want you to walk out of the hall in. Not a woman who has finally managed to forgive herself. A woman who is not the judge, and knows who is, and has stopped attending a hearing that ended eight years ago.

And now the small thing that is asked, and it is small. It is written that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, moves it, Jesus said so Himself, and the operative word is spoken. Not felt about the mountain. Said, to it. The mountain here is not the thing you did; God has already dealt with that mountain, and it is at the bottom of the sea. The mountain is the bench. Say to it, out loud, that you are not the judge. You are in Christ, and He is the Judge who was judged in your place, so the standing to say who sits on the bench was given to you in Him, and it is His Spirit who makes a woman's ordinary voice carry a ruling she did not write, into a room where the case has been closed for eight years and she is only just finding out.