The Question The Child Asks

Rosie asked it at twenty past eight, with the hall light on and her door open the four inches it has to be open.

"Dad. Who is Jesus, actually?"

Owen was already halfway out of the room with one hand on the door.

He came back and sat on the edge of the bed, and the little plastic moon on her shelf was doing its twenty minutes of glow before it goes out, and he gave her the best answer he had.

"Well. He is God's Son. And he was very good, better than anybody. And he wants you to be kind and to tell the truth. And he can see you even when nobody else can."

Rosie said, "Okay," in a small voice, and turned over to face the wall.

Owen stood up. And in the two steps to the door he heard back what he had just said to a six-year-old at bedtime, which was, in effect: there is somebody watching you, and he is better than you, and he has expectations.

He had just described a security camera with feelings.

He stood in the doorway with his hand on the light and understood, for the first time at forty-one, that he had never been told the story either.

Nobody ever sat him down. He had assembled his Jesus out of fragments: a hymn at his grandmother's funeral with a line about blood in it that he found frankly unpleasant. A man outside the train station with pamphlets and a raised voice. A school assembly where a visiting speaker said something about not throwing the first stone. A wedding. A carol service where everybody stood up and nobody explained why.

Out of that, at some point, he had built a figure who was mostly disappointed.

And he could have told you a great deal about what he was supposed to do. He could not have told you one thing that had already been done.

He went back in and sat on the floor with his back against her bed.

"Rosie. Can I have another go at that?"

She rolled over. The moon had about four minutes left.

"I want to tell you a story instead. It starts with a lamb."

If nobody ever told you either, sit down here on the floor with us. There is no exam at the end of this. There is only the account, in the order it happened, and you are allowed to just hear it.

Somebody should have started with the lamb

Exodus 12 is the first time God tells a family what to do about death coming down their street, and the instruction is not a rule about their behavior. It is an animal.

Take a lamb, He said. One for a household, and if the household is too small to finish a whole lamb, share it with the family next door. Bring it in on the tenth day and keep it until the fourteenth. Four days living in the house with the children, being looked at, being checked over, because it has to be without blemish. Then, at evening, it is killed. That is the offering. Scripture does not soften that and I will not either, though I will not linger on it, because the point is not the horror of it. The point is who it was for.

Then the blood goes on the two doorposts and on the lintel with a bunch of hyssop, and the family goes inside and eats standing, dressed, ready to travel.

And death comes down that street in the night, and reaches that door, and passes over it.

Now notice what is not the reason. Not one word in that chapter says the family inside was better than the family four doors down. The house was passed over because of what was on the doorframe. That is Passover, and it is also the whole shape of the announcement, and everything else anybody has ever asked of you is a response to it.

So before one thing is asked of you, hear what was already done. You are inside a house that was passed over, and the reason for it is on the doorframe and not in your record. Exodus 12:13 says when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the Holy Spirit is the reason an ancient sentence about a doorframe is doing something under your ribs right now instead of sitting there as information.

And here is the part Owen stumbled into by accident on his daughter's bedroom floor. God built the child's question into the whole thing on purpose.

And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the LORD's passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt.Exodus 12:26-27

The child asks what does this mean, and God does not hand the parent a rule to pass down. He hands them a story to tell. The answer to the question is an account of something that happened, and the child's whole part in it is to listen.

You were meant to be told this rather than warned into it, and the figure you assembled out of half-heard fragments has no standing at all next to the account itself. That is Exodus 12:26 and 27 and not my preference, and it was His Spirit who put a child's question inside the ceremony in the first place, because He always intended somebody to sit down and tell you.

So here is the account.

A man came down to the Jordan where John was, and John looked up and said, behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world. Not a teacher. Not a better example. A lamb, which in that language meant one thing: something is about to be given, and it is not being given by you.

He went up to Jerusalem at Passover, in the week when the lambs were brought in and examined. And he was examined too, for days, by everybody with a professional reason to find something wrong, and the verdict that came back from the one man with the power to condemn him was I find no fault in him at all. Without blemish. Examined and found clean, in public, on the record.

Then he was given. At the hour the lambs were being prepared across that city, the offering was made, and it was made once.

And then the tomb, and this is where the thing turns. The stone is rolled back and the tomb is empty. That is not a symbol you are being asked to find meaningful. It is a fact you are standing on. Luke 24:3 has them walk in and not find the body, and the same Spirit who raised Him is at work in you while you read a sentence about an empty room.

Now the part almost nobody is told, and it is the part that changes a bedroom at twenty past eight.

The empty tomb is a verdict. Romans 1:4 says He was declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead. The Father had said it once out loud over the water at the Jordan, this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, and then He said it a second time by raising Him out of the ground. The resurrection is the Father's public answer about His Son. It is not a happy ending attached to a sad story. It is a judgment handed down, in favor, in front of everybody.

And Romans 4:25 walks that verdict to your door: He was raised again for our justification. The Father's verdict on His Son is the verdict now spoken over you. You are not waiting on a ruling. It has already been given, it went in your favor, and His Spirit is what makes that land in a person rather than the volume of anyone saying it.