Most of Whom Are Still Living

She has run that Wednesday room for four years and it holds about thirty on a good week.

The woman who asked is new. Six weeks, maybe seven. She sits near the door and she does not say much and she has a way of listening that makes you aware you are being listened to.

And she put her hand up in the middle of a completely ordinary evening and said: how do we know somebody did not just make this up?

Not aggressively. Not testing anybody. She asked it the way you ask something you have wanted to ask for a while and have finally found a room safe enough to ask it in.

There were thirty people in there.

And what came out of the woman running the room, in about a second and a half, was: well, that is where faith comes in.

The new woman said thank you and nodded and wrote something down.

The evening carried on and was fine.

And that was five weeks ago and she has heard herself say that sentence roughly four hundred times since. In the car. Putting the shopping away. At half past four in the morning twice.

Because it was not an answer. It was a door closing, said pleasantly. And she said it to the one person in that room who had worked up the nerve to ask, in front of everybody, which is the most expensive way there is to ask anything.

Paul names a crowd and says they can still be asked

Let me deal with the second and a half first, because it has been under sentence since June.

You were not being lazy. A hand goes up in a full room and there are thirty faces and no notice, and what comes out is whatever is nearest, and what was nearest was a phrase you have heard other people use for thirty years. That is not a character flaw. That is speed.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as excuse: there was something to say, there still is, and you are not required to have invented it. That is not my kind reading of a bad Wednesday, it is what stands written in Paul's fifteenth chapter to Corinth, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line was in the room when the hand went up.

Read what he does, in the middle of the oldest summary of the claim we have.

After that, He appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.1 Corinthians 15:6

Most of whom are still living.

Stop on that clause. It is doing something that has nothing to do with devotion. He is writing to a church that includes people who travel, in a letter that will be read aloud, and he says the witnesses are largely still alive.

There is only one reason to write that. It is an invitation to check.

Now the honest half, because this house does not overclaim and that new woman will spot it if you do.

That verse does not prove the appearance. Nobody has a list of the five hundred, nobody has a signed statement, and a man can write that sentence and be wrong or lying. If she says so she will be right and you should say she is right.

What it does prove is intention. Whoever wrote it was not writing a story set safely out of reach. He was writing to people who could have gone and asked, and he pointed at them on purpose.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a course of reading: there is real ground under that woman's question, because the written word names a crowd and invites the reader to go and find them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept a letter with an invitation to check in it rather than a decree.

And here is the guard, and it is the reason the question was worth asking. That is a floor. It is not a lid. She will still be able to ask a harder version next month, and she should, and an answer that pretends otherwise will cost you her.