That Is Not Your Coat

There is a coat on the back of a chair in the church hall at the end of an evening and everybody has gone.

Ivy is putting the chairs up and she stops at it. Navy, good quality, a bit long, and she stands there for a second working out whose it is, because she knows everybody who was in that room, and she cannot place it on any of them.

She is sixty four and she has been locking up that hall on Thursdays for nineteen years.

She takes it to the office and hangs it on the back of the door with the others, and there are four in there now, and one of them has been on that hook since before the pandemic and she has stopped wondering about it.

Then she turns the lights off and stands in the dark for a moment the way she does.

Here is what I am going to say about her, and then I am going to stop.

Something was done to Ivy a very long time ago, and she was not the one who did it, and she has carried the weight of it since she was seventeen. That is the whole of it and this article will never ask her, or you, for one word more.

I want to be exact about who I am writing to, because on this site that comes before everything else.

I am not writing to somebody who did a thing and cannot get the sense of it off. That reader is real, and there are articles here written carefully for them, and this is not one of them.

I am writing to the person carrying a shame that came out of another person's actions.

And before we go anywhere at all: it was not yours. Nothing about you was a factor. Nothing here is going to circle back later and ask you to check that, because there is nothing there to check.

Which direction is ruled out

Here is the verse.

There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him.

Now, that sentence is usually taught as being about food, and in its original setting a good deal of it was. Jesus is answering a question about washing hands before eating and the disciples ask about it afterward and Mark even adds a note explaining the implication for foods.

I am not going to pretend the passage is about something else. It is about that, and it is also making a claim of a much wider shape, and I want to read the wider shape carefully because it names a direction.

From without a man. Entering into him.

That is a direction of travel. It is describing something coming from outside and going in, and the verse says a thing traveling that direction cannot defile.

Now, hold that against the situation of the person I am writing to.

What happened to you came from outside. That is the entire structure of it. It originated in another person, it came toward you, and it arrived, and you had no part in authoring it and no say in its arriving.

That is precisely the direction of travel this verse rules out.

You are inside the exact direction that Scripture excludes by name. Mark 7:15 rules out what comes from without going in, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written exclusion and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands in an empty hall.

And nothing in this waits behind you forgiving anybody. Not on a timetable, not as a condition, not at all. Whatever is between you and the person who acted is yours and God's at whatever pace is yours, and it stands in front of not one word of this.

You have a standing with nothing whatsoever in front of it, and nothing you have not managed is holding it up. It is written with no condition attached, and His Spirit is the one carrying an unconditional thing into a life, which is why the state does not move with anybody's progress.

The word defile

There is a word in there that deserves handling, because it is a heavy one and I do not want to leave it lying around.

Defile. It means to make common, to render unfit, to change the status of a thing so that it no longer belongs where it belonged.

That is the word for what a person in this situation believes has happened to them. Not that they did something. That something happened and now they are of a different class than they were, and that the change is permanent and structural and not the sort of thing an apology fixes.

And this verse takes exactly that word and says it cannot be done that way. Not that it is unlikely. That it is not possible from that direction, because the direction is wrong.

So the thing a person has been assuming happened to them, in the precise technical sense they have been assuming it, did not happen and could not have.

You were never made common by something arriving from outside, because that is not a thing that can happen in that direction. Scripture uses the exact word for a change of status and rules out the route, and the same Spirit at work in that passage is the one testifying inside a person now.

I want to put this here, in the middle, in plain sight, and say it as warmly as I can. Getting a person alongside you is part of what God is doing and never a lesser version of it. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor who knows this ground. You do not have to describe anything at all to make that call and a good one will never require it. And if the nights have gone long, if the thinking has traveled past the ache and out toward wishing to be gone, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. None of that is a failure of faith. God has always worked through people.

A coat is not a skin

Now the picture, and it is a small one and it does a lot of work.

A coat on the back of a chair belongs to somebody. It came from somewhere. Somebody chose it and paid for it and wore it and left it, and none of that has anything to do with the woman who finds it.

She can pick it up. She can carry it to the office. She can hang it on a hook and look at it every Thursday for nineteen years, and it does not become hers by being carried. It stays the coat of whoever left it, permanently, no matter how long she holds it, because that is how ownership works and holding is not the same as owning.

And a coat is not a skin. It goes on and it comes off and the person underneath it is unchanged by the wearing.

That is the whole of it. What you have been carrying has an owner and the owner is not you, and no amount of years holding it has transferred one thing.

You have been carrying rather than owning, and the two never once became the same thing. Mark 7:15 rules out the transfer by direction, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you that you stop noticing it hanging there. Nineteen years of a thing goes at the pace it goes and there is no schedule here that anybody has the right to hand you.

You are clean right now with it still on the hook, and the hook has never once been a witness about you. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.