A Hundredfold, Counted Differently

Forty people in a house built for eight, and every single one of them is talking at once.

His aunt has made the rice in the pan nobody else is allowed to touch. There is a fan in the window that has not turned since the year the refrigerator was delivered. Somebody's kid is asleep under the coats on the bed and somebody else's kid has made it his life's work to wake him. His mother is telling the story about the dog again and she is telling it wrong on purpose, because the wrong version is funnier. This is a good family. He would want that on the record before anything else gets said. Nobody in that kitchen has ever been cruel to him. Not once, not in forty years.

Then he says one sentence. It is not even a big one. It is about something God did this month, and he says it the way a man mentions the weather, and there is half a second.

Half a second. That is the whole of it. Then his uncle asks whether he wants more rice, and the room folds back over the gap the way water does, and the story about the dog carries on, and nobody has done a single thing wrong, and he passes his plate.

You know that half second better than you know your own signature. You have been living inside it for years. And you have run the arithmetic more times than you would admit to anybody, because you did give things up for this. A whole set of Fridays. Three friendships that thinned out without anybody ever deciding anything. A version of yourself who was considerably easier to have at a table. You are not bitter about one hour of it and you would do it all again. But then you read the verse where Jesus says a hundredfold, and you look around that kitchen, and the numbers will not meet, and a quiet sentence has been forming in you for a long time now. It did not come back.

Read the list He gives back

Peter says it first, and he says it clumsily, which is exactly why I trust him with it. Lo, we have left all, and have followed thee. Half a boast, half a question, entirely honest. And Jesus does not scold him for the arithmetic. He answers it.

And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.Mark 10:29-30

Houses and lands are in that sentence, and I am going to leave them precisely where Jesus left them, which is inside a list that ends with the words with persecutions. Anybody who reads that line as an arrangement, where a man hands something over and something better comes back to him, has turned a promise about a family into a tally, and I will not do that to you and would not know how. Nothing God gives is ever fastened to what you gave up.

What the sentence names twice, in the leaving and again in the receiving, is people. Brothers. Sisters. Mothers. Children. That is the half of the reply that answers your aunt's kitchen, and it is the half I am staying with.

You have brothers and sisters and mothers in this that you have never once been introduced to, and Mark 10:30 puts the receiving of them in the present tense. Not in the world to come. That is the clause after it, and Jesus keeps the two apart on purpose. Now, in this time. And it is the Holy Spirit who does that introducing, in His own order and at a speed nobody consulted you about.

So the promise did not fail, and it is not running late either. The trouble is which column you have been counting. You went looking for the hundredfold in the one room where you were already standing, which is the single place Jesus never told anybody to look.

You were given kin, and the giving of them is done, whatever the count is at that table on a Saturday afternoon. Jesus said now, in this time, and it is written that way and no other way, and the same Spirit who moved Peter to ask the awkward question is holding the answer open over your life.

Kin is a fact, and it was never a feeling of closeness

Think about how the word works in an ordinary family.

You have relatives you have never met. Second cousins in a city you have never visited. A great grandmother whose voice you would not recognize if she walked into the room. None of them is less related to you for it. Nobody has ever once suggested that relation is produced by acquaintance. Descent makes kin. Meeting is a lovely thing that sometimes happens afterward and sometimes does not.

Now say the same sentence about the household of faith, and do not soften it on the way through.

There are men and women who prayed your Tuesday sentence in Portuguese and in Korean and in a language that has been dead for eight hundred years. There are people awake at this hour who share a Father with you and would recognize your week from a description. You have not been introduced to any of them, and the introduction was never what made them yours.

You have relatives in this at every hour of the day and on every continent, and not one of them needed an introduction in order to be related to you. Hebrews 12:1 calls them a cloud, which is a word chosen for a number nobody is counting, and His Spirit is what has been standing you inside it since long before you noticed.

Here is what that does to the half second at the table.

It does not stop it happening. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to tell you what to say in your own family's kitchen, and I am not going to hint that they will come round, because I do not know that and neither does anybody who says it to you. What changes is what the half second is evidence of. You have been reading it as evidence that your family is smaller than the promise. It is not. It is evidence that a room has a size and a family does not.

You are kin to more people than that house could hold, and your own table stays exactly as good as it has always been. That is written into the promise Jesus made in Mark 10:29-30, where the receiving is counted out in brothers and sisters and mothers, and the Spirit is what makes a stranger four centuries back read as family.