Chief

Five minutes early, engine off, a church car park, and somebody is rehearsing a sentence he has never said out loud to anybody inside that building.

We know the car park. We have the sentence too, and over the years we have worked out precisely how much of it can be said and to whom, and we have concluded that the full version would cost more than we can pay.

Paul put his into a letter that got copied and read aloud in churches. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. Chief means first, at the head of the list, and the tense is present. Decades after the Damascus road, with churches planted across the empire, he still refuses the past tense. Three verses earlier he says what he means by it: a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious. Then he gives his reason for putting it in writing. That in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe. He is offering himself as a specimen. If the mercy reached that far up the list, nobody standing below him is out of range.

Lord, we have been saying the manageable version for years. We have edited it for the people we sit near on Sundays until it stopped costing anything to say. Take the whole sentence today, the one that stays in the car. Take it, and make of us what you made of him, evidence rather than a warning. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 72 is Do Not Fear (Isaiah 41:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two