Cleverly Devised Stories

He was a good guest, which is why it landed the way it did.

A colleague of his wife's, first time in the house, and he had done everything right. He arrived with something. He ate properly and said so. He asked the children real questions and listened to the answers, which almost nobody does.

And somewhere after the second pot, in a lull that nobody engineered, he said something about how every people group ends up with a founding story, and that it seems to be a thing human beings simply do, and that there is something rather beautiful in it.

He was not attacking. There was nothing in it at all. He said it the way you would say that most languages have a word for rain.

And the man at the head of that table nodded.

He nodded, and he made a small sound of agreement, and he moved the conversation on to the parking on that street, which is a subject he does not care about.

The guest went home at about eleven and thanked them properly and has since sent a message saying it was a lovely evening, which it was.

That was in March.

And he has thought about the nod almost every week since, and the thing that will not leave him alone is not that he failed to argue. He does not want to be a man who argues at his own table. It is that in the moment, in his own house, with his own children two seats away, he could not find one single thing to put in the space, and so he agreed with something he does not believe.

The account expects that sentence and answers it

Let me be fair about the nod before anything else, because it was not cowardice and calling it that would be lazy.

You had a guest in your house who had been kind all evening. A man who starts a debate at that moment has chosen being right over the room, and you did not do that, and you were not wrong not to. Hospitality is not nothing: it is written into the law and the letters both, and the Holy Spirit has done a great deal of His work at tables.

The trouble is that a nod is not silence. A nod is a small yes, and you gave one, and it has been sitting in you since March.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: you were not stuck for an answer because there is not one, and you are not required to invent anything. That is not my kind reading of a March evening, it is what stands written in the second letter of Peter, where the exact objection your guest made is picked up and answered in the first person, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved that line was in the courtyard with you.

Read it, and notice that the writer reaches for the word your guest used.

For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty.2 Peter 1:16

Cleverly devised stories. That is the objection, named, inside the document itself, by somebody expecting it.

Whoever wrote that sentence knew perfectly well that a founding story is a thing peoples produce, and knew that the claim would be sorted into that pile, and put a denial in the text before anybody had made the accusation out loud.

So this is yours right now rather than pending better preparation: the account is not naive about the objection, because the written word raises it and answers it directly, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept that answer in the record where an ordinary man could find it two thousand years later.

Now let me be honest about what that verse does and does not do, because this house does not overclaim and you would smell it if it did.

It does not settle anything. A document denying that it is a legend is exactly what a legend would say, and you know that, and your guest would say it politely if you quoted the verse at him.

What it does is remove one thing from the table: the idea that the people who wrote this had not thought about it. They had. They were making a claim about a named man, in a named decade, in a place people could travel to, and they knew what category they were asking to be judged in and they asked to be judged in it anyway.

That is different from a founding story, and the difference is not that one is true. The difference is what kind of claim is being made. A founding story is usually set in a time before time, where nothing can be checked. This one is set in a Tuesday.

And here is the guard, because it is this whole site: nobody is handing you certainty. What is written gives you ground and not the end of the question, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a man to stop asking in order to keep standing.