The Verse That Would Not Sit Down

It was a Tuesday morning in a year he can name and it was verse fourteen of an unremarkable chapter.

He was not looking for anything. He was reading the way he reads, which is steadily and without much expectation, a chapter at a time, in a chair, before the house wakes up.

And a line came up off the page and went through him.

He has read that verse perhaps two hundred times since. He has looked at it in the original. He has read four commentaries on it, and every one of them says something sensible and none of them says the thing that happened.

Nine years.

He has never mentioned it. And in his case the reason is unusually specific, because he is an unusually specific man.

He cannot construct a defensible account of it.

He knows exactly what he would say if somebody described this to him. He would say, kindly, that a verse landing hard is a well-understood phenomenon, that the mind is primed by circumstances, that attention and emotion do this, and that it is not necessary to reach for anything unusual to explain it.

He believes that argument. He thinks it is a good argument.

And he also knows, in a way he has never been able to reconcile with it, that it is not what happened.

So he holds two things that will not sit together, and rather than live with the discomfort in public, he has held them both privately for nine years and said nothing to anybody.

So let me ask you.

Which verse has never gone back to being one verse among many?

They only asked each other afterwards

There is a walk of about seven miles on the afternoon of the resurrection, and two men are on it, and a stranger joins them and explains the Scriptures to them the whole way.

They do not recognize Him. That is stated plainly. Whatever was happening, it was not accompanied by any recognition at the time.

And then He is gone, and here is what they say.

They asked each other, Were not our hearts burning within us while He talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?Luke 24:32

Notice that it is a question, and that it comes afterwards. You are doing exactly what those two men did, which is to check a thing against one other person, and the Holy Spirit had opened the Scriptures to them while they recognized nothing at all.

Now look at the grammar of that, because it is doing three things at once and I want each of them.

First, it is a question. Not a statement. They do not say our hearts were burning. They ask each other whether they were, which is the sound of two people checking something against another person because they do not trust it alone.

Second, they ask it afterwards. Not during. During, they walked seven miles and talked about the news and did not know who He was.

Third, and this is the one for you: they say it to each other. Two people, privately, on the same road, each of whom had been carrying it separately for the entire walk and neither of whom had mentioned it.

Hear where you stand, nine years on from verse fourteen.

You are not a careful man who had a moment of enthusiasm. Scripture puts were not our hearts burning in the mouths of two men who did not recognize anything at the time and only compared notes when it was over, and the Spirit He poured out never once needed a person's explanation to be complete before He would open a text to them.

And now I want to address the actual thing, which is not the verse and is not the phenomenon.

It is that you are holding two accounts that do not reconcile, and you have decided that this is an intellectual failure, and it is not one.

The argument you would make to somebody else is a good argument. Attention and emotion do exactly what you say they do. That is true and I am not going to pretend it is not, and a man who abandons it because a passage moved him has given up something he should keep.

But this is a sufficient explanation and this is what happened are different claims, and only the first one is available to anybody from the outside. You have been demanding of yourself a certainty that the situation does not contain, and then reading your failure to reach it as a reason for silence.

The word says they asked each other. That is the whole method those two men had, and it was enough.

And you are not a careful man who had a lapse. Luke 24 has two men asking each other afterwards whether their hearts had not been burning, and they recognized nothing at all at the time, and the Spirit has never needed a defensible account before opening a text to somebody.