Three of Us on the Top Deck

Three of them up there and eleven miles to go, and the window on her side has gone to fog because the heater on this route has one setting and the setting is too much.

A lad four seats up with headphones on, doing the thing where he mouths the words and thinks nobody can see. A woman near the stairs with two carrier bags between her feet, on the phone, saying yes, love, and no, love, and I know, love, in a rotation. And her, near the back, with her forehead more or less against a window she cannot see out of.

She wipes a patch with her sleeve. It fogs again in about ninety seconds. She wipes it again. This will go on for eleven miles and she is not really watching the town anyway.

What she is doing, and has been doing on this bus twice a week for years, is running the case.

Not the memory. The case. What she should have said, what she did say, what the sequence was, which part somebody would query, how it would sound if anybody ever asked, and what the answer would have to be. She is the prosecution and the defense and the witness and the person taking the notes, and she has been all four for a very long time, and nobody has ever relieved her, because nobody knows there is a case.

Sit with me here a while. Something was done to you by another person, a long way back. I am not going to ask you what it was, not now, not later, not at the end of this. I will not ask you to tell one human being anything, ever. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

And one more thing, right at the top, because you are watching for it: nothing in this message asks you to forgive anybody today. Not today, not by the end, not as the mature next step. That is not what this is.

What Christ actually did with a wrong done to Him

There is one verse in Peter's first letter that tells you what the Lord Himself did when He was wronged, and it is not what most people assume.

Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously.1 Peter 2:23

Read the last clause slowly, because everything is in it.

Committed himself to him that judgeth righteously. That word for committed is a handing over. It is what you do when you leave something valuable with somebody you trust: you deposit it, and it stops being in your hands, and it starts being in theirs, and the arrangement is a legal one.

He did not say it did not matter. He did not pretend it had not happened. He did not conclude that the people doing it were fine. He handed the case, whole and unaltered, to the one Judge who judges righteously, and He walked on without it.

That is not passivity. That is a transfer of custody.

You are permitted to hand the whole case over intact, and you were never appointed to prosecute it yourself. I am not offering you an easier feeling there. The written word shows Christ doing exactly that with a wrong done to Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off the page and puts it into hands that have been holding a file for years.

A transfer is not a verdict, and it is not forgiveness

I want to be careful, because this is the point where people slide something past you and I am not going to.

Handing the case to the Judge is not saying it was nothing. It is the opposite. You only deposit something with a court if it is real and it matters and it has to be dealt with properly.

And it is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is its own subject, it has its own hour, and that hour is not this one and nobody on this site is going to put a date on it. What is on offer right now is narrower and heavier and more useful: you can stop being the one who has to hold it up.

The file stays open. It simply stops being open in your hands.

You are free to put the whole thing down without it being dropped, and you were never the only one keeping it from being forgotten. Scripture says God will not forget the oppressed and their cause is His, and it is His Spirit, not an act of will on a night bus, who makes a person's hands actually let go.