The Room Was Already Empty

Four forty in the morning, and Odile is at the side door of the hall with her own scouring pads in her coat pocket, because the ones in the cupboard give up after two pans and she stopped complaining about that around year three.

Six years of Saturdays. The Friday crew runs the youth night and leaves the roasting pans, which is not malice, it is just what happens at eleven at night when everybody has a ride waiting. So Odile comes in at twenty to five and does the pans, and mops where the pans have dripped, and sets out ninety cups with the spoons standing in them, and puts the urn on, so that when the doors open at seven and the men come up from the shelter on Rue Fabien there is heat, and there is coffee, and nobody has to wait.

She has a rhythm. Gloves on. The big sink. The window over the sink goes from black to gray to gold while she works, and by the time it is gold she is on the last pan, the one with the burnt lentils welded into the corner, and she scrapes at that corner with her thumbnail through the pad and thinks about nothing at all. It is the best part of her week and she would not say that out loud to anybody.

The second Saturday in February she puts her key in the door and the lights are already on.

The pans are stacked on the rack, upside down, dry. The floor has been mopped and it has had time to dry too. Ninety cups are out on the long table with the spoons already standing in them, and the urn is ticking as it comes up to heat.

Odile stands in the middle of the room with her gloves in her hand.

She is not glad. That is the part she would be ashamed to tell you. First she is angry, in a hot and unreasonable way she cannot justify to herself, and underneath the anger there is a quieter thing that she has no words for at all. If the pans are done, what is she.

She walks to the rack. She lifts down the lentil pan and turns it over and looks into the corner. It is clean, right into the seam. She picks up a second one. Clean.

Bertrand comes out of the office with his coat still on and tells her the night crew from the depot came by at one in the morning. They asked for the key on Thursday. They wanted to. He says they told him it was their turn.

Then he says there is a plate for her under a cloth on the hatch, and the coffee is hot, and would she please sit down.

And Odile, who has arrived braced at four forty in the morning for six years, stands in the middle of a finished kitchen holding a clean pan, and has absolutely no idea what to do with her hands.

They brought spices to a job that was already over

The detail that undoes me is the shopping.

The women who went to the tomb on the first day of the week had bought spices. They had been to somebody's stall, they had counted out money, they had carried the jars home and set them by the door for the morning. Then they walked out in the dark, and on the road they were working through the practical problem, which was that the stone across the mouth of the tomb weighed more than all of them put together. Who will roll us away the stone. That is a working question, asked by working women, on their way to do the last thing love is able to do for a body.

They were not going to be rescued. They were going to be useful.

And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord JesusLuke 24:2-3

You arrived braced, and there was nothing to brace for. Luke 24:2 has that stone moved before one person in the story has done a single useful thing, and the same Spirit who pressed that sentence into the record is pressing it into you at this moment: nothing in it was waiting on your arrival.

But an empty room only means something if you know what was finished inside it, so go back a long way first, to a night in Egypt when a whole nation was told to eat standing up.

Passover. A lamb for a house. Not a lamb for the good households and a different arrangement for the rest, one lamb, one household, and the blood taken in a basin and put on the two side posts and the upper post of the door. And the word that came with it was not about the family behind the door. When I see the blood, I will pass over you. Not when I see your record. Not when I see how the year went in that house. When I see the blood.

Centuries later a man standing waist deep in the Jordan looks up, sees Jesus walking toward him, and says the strangest sentence in the New Testament: Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. He does not say teacher. He does not say example, or founder, or reformer. He says Lamb, because the doorposts had been rehearsing this for fifteen hundred years and the offering had finally walked up the riverbank.

And that offering is not partly yours to finish. Hebrews 10:12 says that when He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, He sat down, and a seated priest is a completed job. His Spirit is what turns that ancient posture into rest instead of information. You have nothing to add to it and there is nothing missing from it.

Read what those verses say the other priests are doing. Standing. Standing daily, ministering, offering oftentimes the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. Standing is the posture of work that is never finished. Odile at four forty with her pads. Every Saturday, forever, and the burnt corner always back again by the following week.

Then Friday, and then a garden, and then a Sunday morning when the stone gets moved. It was never moved to let Him out. It was moved to let them in, so that somebody could put their head into that cold cut room and see, with their own eyes, that it was empty.

You are standing in front of an empty room and it is the loudest thing in the whole book. What is written is written: they found not the body of the Lord Jesus, and the Spirit of God has been carrying that news for two thousand years without once turning it into a task.

Now here is what the empty room is, and this is the piece nobody ever handed Odile. The resurrection is not a happy ending stitched onto a sad story. It is the Father's verdict on His Son's offering, said out loud, in public, where the whole world could hear it. Romans 1:4 says He was declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead. Romans 4:25 says He was delivered for our offenses and raised again for our justification. The raising is the Father's ruling on the sacrifice, and the ruling is: accepted. It is the same voice that spoke over the river when the Spirit came down like a dove, saying this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

And the verdict spoken over Him is the verdict spoken over you. Romans 4:25 puts your justification inside His resurrection rather than beside it, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to work up a feeling to make that legal fact truer; He is telling you what has already been ruled. You are accepted in the Beloved, this morning, in whatever state you walked in here.