The Phone That Does Not Get Answered

Four o'clock on a Sunday, because that has always been the time.

He can picture the phone exactly. It is a landline, cream, on the hall sideboard under the mirror, next to the dish where the keys go and a small brass thing that was his grandmother's. The answering machine was unplugged years ago after some cold call upset the household, and nobody ever plugged it back in. So there is no message, no voice, no beep. There is only the ringing, and then there is not.

He counts the rings. He has never decided to count them, he simply does. Six is normal. Eight is where the room starts to change. At eleven he puts the phone down, and he has never once got past eleven, and there was one Sunday in June when he got to fourteen just to see, and it was worse.

It has been like this since the spring.

He knows what the argument was about and he could tell you, and it would sound smaller in the telling than it is, the way these always do. What he cannot tell you is why it went from a bad afternoon to this. There were two weeks where messages were still being read, and then there was a Sunday where they were not, and the shape of that hardening is the thing he goes over at two in the morning.

He is not a man without resources. He has a church that has prayed about it more than once. He has a wife who is patient and a sister who is not, and both of them are right in their way. And he has, because he has believed for a long time, a settled conviction that the words of Jesus are the most durable things in the universe, which is a fine sentence in the daylight.

Then it is four o'clock on a Sunday and he is on ring nine, standing at the window with his thumb over the button, and he hears something go through him that he does not say out loud. It goes: well. That is the answer, then.

And it is only afterwards, putting the kettle on, that he catches what he has done. He has let a telephone give evidence in a case it knows nothing about.

The phone can tell him one thing. It can tell him whether a handset in a hallway was picked up between four and four minutes past. It is an excellent witness to that and it has been consistent since March. It cannot tell him one syllable about whether what Christ said still stands, because it was never in the room when Christ said it, and it has no standing to comment.

But it speaks anyway. Every Sunday, in a very calm voice, and it has been getting a hearing.

Perhaps something in your life has been giving evidence outside its competence. A test result. A door somebody keeps closing. An empty side of a bed. Something that is genuinely, verifiably true about the situation, and has been quietly promoted to being true about God.

Where Jesus chose to put that sentence

Look at where the line sits, because the placement is most of the argument.

Jesus says it in the middle of the Olivet discourse, which is the most destabilizing passage in the Gospels. The disciples have just admired the temple and He has told them there is not going to be one stone left on another. He goes on: wars, famines, betrayal inside families, the sun darkened, the powers of the heavens shaken. He is not soothing anybody. He is describing collapse, in detail, without once suggesting the collapse is imaginary or that it will feel manageable.

And into the middle of that, He drops a fixed point.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.Matthew 24:35

Notice what He does not do. He does not say the visible things are unimportant, and He does not say they are less real than they look. He says the opposite: they are so real that they are going to end with a noise. Heaven and earth, the two most permanent nouns available to a first century listener, are on the list of things that pass.

And then, on the other list, with nothing else on it, He puts what He has said.

That is a ranking, and it is not a sentimental one. It is a statement about which of the two things in your hallway is temporary. The cream telephone is temporary. The sideboard it stands on is temporary. The mirror above it and the house around it and the street outside are on the list that passes. The sentence Jesus spoke is on the other list.

Take that where you are standing: you are holding something older and more durable than the object that has been contradicting it, and the durability is not your achievement. Matthew 24:35 is the ranking Christ Himself gave, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ranking real to a man at a window on ring nine rather than a fine idea in the daylight.

What a silence is qualified to say

I want to be exact here, because this is where the relief actually is.

A witness is examined for competence before anything else. What did you see. Where were you standing. How do you know. And a witness who was not present is not permitted to testify about what happened, however confident he sounds and however often he repeats himself.

Your silence is a competent witness to one fact and one only: nobody picked up. That fact is true, it is not in dispute, and I am not going to insult you by pretending it is smaller than it is. Since March is a long time. Fourteen rings in June was worse than eleven and you knew it would be.

But that is the whole of its competence. It was not there when Christ said heaven and earth pass and My words do not. It has no knowledge of the word, no access to the word, and no basis for an opinion about the word. It has simply been in the room a great deal, and things that are in the room a great deal begin to sound like judges.

So the word is not on trial in your hallway. Scripture puts what Christ said in the category that survives the end of the world, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that standing in a man on a Sunday afternoon, which means the evidence you have been weighing was never evidence in this matter at all.

The thing I am not going to do

Now let me tell you what I will not do, and I want you to hear it as care rather than withholding.

I am not going to explain the silence to you. I do not know why the spring hardened the way it did and neither does anybody who has offered you a theory about it. I am not going to tell you what God is teaching you through it, because I do not know that either, and a man who assigns a purpose to another man's locked door has stopped ministering and started decorating.

And I am not going to tell you the phone rings. I have no such word, nobody has, and if I said it I would be selling you something on credit that I cannot cover.

Here is what I have got, and it is not a consolation prize. The word of Christ is not being decided by any of this. It stands over the situation you are actually in, unimproved, unresolved, exactly as it is at four o'clock next Sunday.

You have that standing over you right now, and it did not come from a good outcome or wait for one. Matthew 24:35 says His words outlast heaven and earth, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding that over you in a hallway that has not changed since March.