The We That Meant Instead Of Them

He heard it come out of his own mouth in a car park and he has not stopped thinking about it.

He was talking to a man from work, a good conversation, the kind you drive home pleased about. And the man had asked something about the difference between his faith and the older one it came out of, and he had answered, and somewhere in the answer he had said the words: well, we have the fulfillment of it.

We.

Which is true. He would say it again and he would mean it and there is nothing in it he would take back.

But standing between two cars with his keys in his hand, he heard the second half of the word. Not the half he said. The half underneath it.

Instead of them.

He had not meant that. He is fairly sure he has never meant that in his life, and if you had asked him directly he would have been shocked at the suggestion. And it was in there anyway, the way a hum is in a room, and once he heard it he could not stop hearing it in other things he had said for twenty years.

We are the ones who understood it. We are the ones it went to when it did not stay where it started.

He said to his wife that night, badly, that he thinks he has been standing in a room and believing somebody had to leave for him to be in it.

You know that hum.

Maybe you have said something similar and not caught it. Maybe you caught it once and it slid past. Maybe nobody in your life has ever taught you a single word of contempt about anybody, and this thing is still in there, low, in the grammar rather than in the opinions.

Nobody put it there deliberately. It arrives sideways, in the way a story gets summarized when it is being told quickly, and a summary told quickly enough for enough centuries stops sounding like a summary and starts sounding like the shape of the thing.

Read the preposition

There is a sentence in Romans that is famous for what it is usually used to argue about, and the useful part of it is not an argument at all. It is a small word that sits in the middle.

And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree.Romans 11:17

Among them. With them.

Not in place of them. Not after them. Not instead of them, which is the exact phrase the hum in the car park was humming.

Paul had every opportunity to write that sentence the way the hum wants it written, and he wrote a preposition instead, twice, and the preposition is the whole doctrine.

You are sharing a root, and you were grafted in among rather than in place of. That is what the verse says in two words, among them and with them (Romans 11:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who inspired a preposition to carry that much weight, which is why the correction to a hum you never chose is one word long.

What a graft actually is

It is worth knowing the physical thing, because the picture in most people's heads is wrong and the wrong picture is doing the damage.

A graft is not a transplant. Nothing is dug up and nothing is moved. The tree stays exactly where it is, in the same ground, with the same roots, and a cut is made in it, and a shoot from somewhere else is bound into the cut until the two grow together.

The tree does not become the shoot. The shoot does not become the tree. The sap goes up into both.

And nothing about that operation requires a vacancy. A grafted tree is not a tree that lost something and got a substitute. It is a tree carrying more than it started with.

You have been bound into something living, and your place in it was never a space that came free. Scripture says thou wert graffed in among them and with them partakest of the root (Romans 11:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the sap in this picture, the one thing that goes up into every branch on the tree, and nobody has ever had to be removed for Him to reach anybody.

And this page is not going to argue

Let me be plain, because you can feel where a page like this could go and it is not going there.

Nothing here is adjudicating anything about anybody. Not about who stands where, not about what the passage settles, not about the long argument people have had over it in every century since it was written. That argument is real and this is not the place for it, and a manna article that turns into a position paper has stopped handing you anything.

And nothing here is telling you that you have been quietly guilty of something for twenty years. You have not been carrying a sin you failed to notice, and what you heard in a car park was grammar rather than malice. The word says the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who does the searching, gently, and He was not standing between those two cars building a case against you.

He was showing you a word. That is all that happened, and it is a kindness, and you can receive it as one.