The One Who Never Sat Down

The olives come down the way they have come down in that grove for as long as anybody's grandmother can remember: the tarpaulins spread under the trees, the long poles beating the high branches, the fruit rattling onto the plastic like rain, and children sent to pick the ones that bounced into the grass. By noon the sun is straight overhead and somebody's uncle calls the break, and the whole harvest, three families and the neighbors, folds itself down into the shade with bread and white cheese and a kettle on a gas ring.

Everyone sits. Everyone but Dalia.

She is still under the tree with a crate on her hip. She is not making a point. She does not even notice she is doing it, not at first; her hands are sorting leaves out of the olives, and when her cousin holds up a round of bread and says "come, sit," she says what she always says, which is "in a minute," and the minute never comes. It never has. At every meal she has cooked, every wedding she has helped at, every harvest since she was old enough to hold a pole, Dalia has been the one on her feet while everyone else ate, and if you asked her why she would say, honestly, that she does not know, only that sitting down while there is work standing feels like a thing she is not allowed to do.

Today, for the first time, she asks herself who said so.

Not her mother. Her mother is sitting in the shade this minute, laughing, with cheese on her bread. Not her father, who used to sit down before anyone. Not the church; nobody there ever preached a word about it. Not God, as far as she can find. She goes through the whole list, standing under the tree with the crate cutting into her hip and the olives ticking on the tarpaulin, and there is nobody at the end of it. The rule has no author. It has kept her on her feet for thirty years and she cannot tell you who set it.

You have one. A rule you have never questioned, kept so faithfully it feels like part of your faith, and if I asked you tonight to name the person or the verse it came from, you would go through the list, the way she did, and arrive at nobody. And still it stands there under the tree, keeping you on your feet.

The rule with nobody's name on it

Let me name what this is like before I do anything with it, because it has been carried a long time and quietly.

It is not legalism. You would say so, and you would be right; there is no pride in the rule, you barely see it. It is that somewhere a small law got written into you without a signature, and because it looked like faithfulness, or humility, or love, you never checked it. Rules with no author are the hardest to put down precisely because there is nobody to argue with. You cannot go back to whoever set it and ask to be released, because whoever set it does not exist. So the rule just stands there under the tree, year after year, and you stand with it.

Hear me plainly on three things. I am not going to mock you for having kept it; it looked like devotion, and the wanting under it was real. I am not going to tell you that all rules are invented; God has spoken, and what He said is life, and this article is not about His commands and never will be. And I am not going to hand you a better rule to keep instead, always sit down at meals, because that would just be a new law with my name on it and you would keep it as faithfully as the last one. What I am going to do is show you a sentence Paul wrote to a church that was very good at keeping rules with nobody's name on them.

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations, "Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch," according to human precepts and teachings?Colossians 2:20-22

Read the question. He is not scolding. He is puzzled, the way you would be puzzled to find a person who had been let out of a locked room still standing inside it. Why do you submit? And then he names what these regulations are: human precepts and teachings. Not God's. And the next verse is the one for you: these have indeed an appearance of wisdom. An appearance. They look wise. They look devout. Standing under the tree while everyone eats looks like humility. It is not that the rule is stupid; it is that it is authorless, and it borrowed the face of holiness to get past you. You are free of every rule that has no author, and I am not the one saying so; it is written in Colossians, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifts a thing like that off a person, gently, without a struggle.

Now stay with me, because this next part is where the freedom actually is. Paul says you died with Christ. That is the ground. You are not putting the rule down because you have decided it is silly. You are putting it down because you belong to Someone whose commands are written, and this one is not among them, and a free person under a real King does not take orders from a rule that cannot say who sent it. Jesus put it sharply to people who had built a whole hedge of authorless rules around the real ones: you leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men (Mark 7:8). He was not against commandments. He was against the hedge. You have a Master whose word is written down, and the Spirit who wrote it never once wrote yours; that is why it has no author, and that is why it lifts.

And I want to say the frightening thing out loud, because it is the thing that keeps you standing. The rule tells you that if you sit down, something falls apart. The bread will not get served, the harvest will stall, the wedding will fail, someone will think less of you, God will think less of you. That is the appearance of wisdom doing its work. But test it. Look at the shade. Your mother is sitting. Your father sat. The neighbors are sitting. Nothing has fallen apart around any of them; the harvest is still there, the tree is still there. The rule made a promise about consequences that it never had the standing to make. You are held by God, and He does not hold you more tightly on your feet than He does in the shade; His word is where His requirements live, and His Spirit is the one who keeps the harvest, not your standing.

I know two things try to stand between you and receiving this. One says this was for Colossae and their handle-taste-touch and not for a woman with an olive crate on her hip. The other says it may be for people in general, but yours has been kept so long that it must be load-bearing by now. Hear me. Paul's letter did not have an expiry date, and Jesus said the Spirit He gives stays with His people to the end, which is long enough to reach this noon. And a rule that has been kept for thirty years without an author is not thirty years more true; it is thirty years more familiar, which is a different thing entirely.

One more thing, and I say it because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the rule you live by has been costing you your safety or your body, if it says things like do not eat or do not rest or do not tell anyone, that is not something a page can lift and not something to carry alone. Tell somebody tonight, a person you trust or a doctor or your emergency number where you live. That is not me writing you a rule. That is me refusing to leave you standing under the tree by yourself.