It Seemed To Them Like Nonsense

There were nine people in that meeting and she had checked the figures twice.

She is not a person who says things in meetings for the sake of saying them. She had gone through it on the Sunday night at her own kitchen table, and again on Monday morning, and she was right about the number and she is still right about it.

And she said it.

Not emotionally. She would like that understood, and she has had to say it to herself about forty times since, which is its own kind of evidence.

What happened next took about six seconds.

The man opposite her did a thing with his mouth. The woman beside him looked at him rather than at her. And the man at the end, who is decent and who she likes, said: I think we are maybe getting a bit worked up about this.

And that was it. The meeting moved.

Three people, in six seconds, decided together and without saying so that what they were dealing with was a woman having a feeling.

That was March.

She has been in eleven meetings since and she has said almost nothing in any of them. Not sulking. Something more careful than sulking: she has quietly worked out that the cost of being right in that room is being read, and she has decided she would rather be useful than read.

And the thing she cannot put down, at half past ten at night, is not the six seconds.

It is that she has started to wonder whether she was being emotional. Because three people is a lot of people, and they all thought so, and she has begun to reconstruct her own tone from their faces.

The account keeps the word the men used

Let me put one thing down before anything else, because it is the thing that has been quietly eaten since March.

Three people agreeing does not make a thing so. It makes it feel so, which is different, and the difference is almost impossible to hold onto from the inside of a room. That is not weakness in you, that is what rooms do.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as sympathy: the account you were handed keeps a version of that exact six seconds, and it did not have to. That is not my kind reading of a hard spring, it is what stands written in Luke's twenty-fourth chapter, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it was in that meeting with you.

Read what the men did with the first report of the most important claim in the whole book.

But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.Luke 24:11

Seemed to them like nonsense.

The word underneath that in the original is not a gentle one. It is closer to the language of raving, of the kind of talk you would dismiss without examining, and whoever put this account together wrote it down and left it in.

Now stop and think about what that costs a document.

If you were building a case, you would not do this. You would not have the central discovery made by witnesses whose testimony carried little weight in that world, and you would certainly not add a line recording that your own leadership dismissed them as raving.

You would have Peter find it. You would have a Roman soldier find it. What is written did neither, and the Holy Spirit saw to it that the version nobody would have designed is the one that came down to us.

So this is yours right now rather than pending anybody's permission: what you hold keeps its own embarrassments, because the written word records that the first witnesses were not believed and names the word used about them, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the humiliating version was the one that survived.

Now the honest boundary, because this house does not overclaim.

That argument addresses invention. It does not establish everything, and it should not be stretched to. A document that keeps details damaging to itself is a document behaving oddly for a fabrication, and people who study this take that seriously in both directions, and it is one consideration among several rather than a proof.

What it is not is nothing. And what it means for you tonight is smaller and more useful than a proof: you are standing inside a tradition whose founding record contains the sentence they thought she was talking nonsense, and did not delete it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been keeping the unflattering line in the written account since the beginning.