Always the Size of Everybody

She got there eleven minutes early and still ended up at the back, because the back was where she had decided to be before she left the house.

It was a funeral for a woman from work. Forty years of shared corridors and one shared joke about the photocopier, and now a building she had never been inside, full of people who knew exactly when to stand.

That was the part she had not expected to mind. The standing. They all moved at the same moment, like a shoal turning, and nobody had told them to, and she was half a beat behind on every one of them. She sat down twice while everyone was still up.

At the end an old man in the row in front turned round to shake her hand, and she panicked slightly and shook it, and he said, "Thank you for coming," as if it were his house.

Walking out she looked up at the lettering above the door, the word she had seen on that kind of building her whole life and had never once read as a word. She had read it as a surname. As a team sheet. As the name of something belonging to people who knew when to stand.

Their church. Not the church. Theirs.

She sat in the car for a while before she started it.

Nobody had ever told her that the word on that door is not a name at all. It is a measurement.

The word is a size

It is a Greek word, and it came into use early, and it means something closer to according to the whole than to anything you would print on a sign. It turns up in a short letter written by a man named Ignatius, on a road, under guard, near the beginning of the second century, and he uses it the way you would use the word ocean.

He was not naming a franchise. There was nothing yet to franchise. He was saying: this thing is not local.

That is what the word was for. Not to mark out who is in and who is out, but to say that the thing being described has no edges you could stand at the back of. Not a Jerusalem thing. Not a Roman thing. Not one street, one language, one kind of family, one set of people who know when to stand.

Which means that for most of your life you have been reading a word about scale as if it were a word about ownership, and you have been standing outside a building on the strength of a misread. Revelation 7 shows a crowd nobody could number, out of every nation and tribe and people and language, and the Spirit was in the gathering of it, so the word was always about how many and never about whose.

Here is what the word was reaching for, in the one place that describes the finished thing.

After this I looked, and there was a great crowd that no one could number, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.Revelation 7:9

Read the middle of it slowly. No one could number. Not a large group. A group that defeats counting, which is a very different thing, and John says it as a man who has just tried.

And then the four words the whole verse turns on: every nation, all tribes, all peoples, all languages. That is not a courtesy list. Every single one of those categories is somebody's back row. Somebody's wrong accent. Somebody who did not know when to stand.

They are all in the frame, and none of them are described as guests.

So the word on the door was never a claim about a club. It was a claim about a crowd. And a crowd that no one can number is by definition a crowd with room in it, which is the plainest thing in the verse and the last thing anybody notices.

You have been treating the size of it as the reason you are outside. The size of it is the reason you are not. Revelation 7 counts every nation into that one crowd, and the Spirit has never once used the scale of a thing as a fence around it.