The Man in the Barber's Mirror

The cape goes on with a snap and Hal is looking at himself in the long mirror, which is the one place in town he cannot avoid doing it, because a man cannot get a haircut with his eyes shut.

Saturday morning. Two men on the bench behind him waiting, and Denny working, and the radio on the shelf that has been on the same station since Hal was in high school.

He is fifty three.

Nine weeks ago he confessed something. Properly. Alone, in his own kitchen, at the table, out loud, and he was not vague about any of it and he did not soften a word. He has not gone back to it since and he does not intend to.

He believes it was forgiven. If Denny stopped cutting and asked him straight out, right now, in front of the two men on the bench, Hal would say yes without a flicker.

And the face in that mirror is the same face.

That is the whole difficulty and it has been the difficulty for nine weeks. He expected something. Not a light on the road. He is not that sort of man and he would be embarrassed by the suggestion. He expected that at some point he would look at himself and find something different, and every morning for nine weeks he has looked and found the same man.

Denny asks about the back and he says the usual.

If that is your mirror, this is written for you. And I want to give you one sentence Jesus said on the worst night of everybody's life, because of what it names as the cause and what it conspicuously does not.

What it names as the cause

Here is the sentence.

Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.

Through the word which I have spoken unto you.

That is a statement of cause and it is precise. The thing that did it is named, and it is His speech. Not their reception of His speech. Not their response to it, not their understanding of it, and not any change it produced in them that anybody could observe.

The word He spoke. That is the instrument, and it is entirely on His side of the room.

Now think about what that rules out as a place to check.

If the cause were their response, then the state of their response would be the place to look, and a man could reasonably audit himself in a mirror to see whether the response had taken. That is a coherent thing to do if the response is the mechanism.

The response is not the mechanism. The cause is located in something He said, which happened outside a man, and which is not affected by what happens in a mirror on a Saturday morning.

You have a cause named in that sentence and it sits entirely outside the person it worked on. John 15:3 names the word He spoke as the instrument, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written cause and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands under a barber's cape.

Who He said it to

Now the setting, and it is the part that undoes me every time.

He says that on the last night, in an upstairs room, to eleven men.

And within a few hours every one of them fails. One of them denies knowing Him three times in a courtyard, out loud, to a servant girl, with cursing. The rest run. That is not a harsh reading of the passage, it is what the text says happened.

So when Jesus says now ye are clean, He is saying it to men whose next few hours are on record and are not good, and He says it anyway, in the present tense, before any of it.

He is not describing their trajectory. He is not commending their reliability. He is stating a condition, in the present, over men He knows exactly what is coming for.

You are being addressed in a sentence spoken over men whose worst hours were still ahead of them. Scripture places that statement on the last night before the failure rather than after any recovery, and the same Spirit at work in that room is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the nine weeks of looking has gotten heavier, if the mornings have started with an audit, if the nights have been getting long or the thinking has traveled out past regret toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Call your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people, and one across a table from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

Now is a word about time

There is one more word and it is the first one.

Now ye are clean.

Not you will be. Not you are becoming. Now, which fixes it to a moment, and the moment is the one they were standing in, and it was a Thursday evening in a borrowed room with a meal on the table and nothing resolved. That is the tense John 15:3 uses, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it in the present tense inside a reader.

And a man in a barber's chair on a Saturday morning is standing in a now of his own, which is exactly as ordinary and exactly as unresolved, and the word does the same work in it.

There is no better moment coming that the verse is waiting for. It is not deferred to a point when a man looks different to himself. Now was a Thursday evening in a room where the worst was still ahead, and now is a Saturday morning under a cape with the radio on.

You are clean in a now that does not wait for a better one. John 15:3 fixes it to the present moment rather than to any improvement, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you the face changes. It probably will not, and a great many faithful men have looked at the same face for forty years and been entirely clean the whole time, and no honest person can hand you a date.

You are clean right now with the same face in the mirror, and the face has never once been a witness. It is written and it is stated, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a stated thing real in a body.