Nobody Ever Mentioned the Steps

Kareem knew that village his whole life and had never been there.

He could describe it. He had been describing it, to people, since he was about nine: the well in the square, the two trees, the road that comes in from the north and how you can see the whole of it from the bend before you arrive.

His grandfather told him. His mother told him, differently. Two uncles told him, and their versions did not entirely agree, and there was a long-running disagreement about whether the school was on the left or the right.

Forty-one years of that. Photographs, a few. A great deal of talking. Every detail of that village arriving in his head through somebody's mouth.

He went in the spring.

And here is what he says about it, and he has told it four times now and the shape of the story has not changed.

The well was there and the trees were there and the road was exactly as described.

And there were seven stone steps up from the square to the door of the house, worn in the middle, with a groove down one side where water has run for a hundred years.

Nobody had ever mentioned the steps.

Not his grandfather, who was born in that house. Not his mother. Not either uncle. Not because they were hiding them and not because they had forgotten. Because when you have climbed a set of steps ten thousand times they stop being a feature, and the things people tell you about a place are the things that were remarkable to them, which is a different list from the things that are there.

He stood at the bottom of those steps for a while.

And what he thought was not sentimental, and he has been slightly embarrassed to say it out loud: he thought, what else is here that nobody said.

Now let me ask you what you know about the Bible.

Because if you are like most people, and I include a great many people who have been in church their whole lives, almost all of it arrived through somebody's mouth. Sermons. Explanations. A good book. A friend who is further on. Somebody's summary of a passage, given honestly, by a person who had read it.

And all of that is real and none of it is wasted. But every one of those is a description of a village.

Come and see

There is a moment right at the start of John's Gospel that is over in one line and is one of the most important invitations in the book.

Philip has found Nathanael and told him about Jesus, and Nathanael says something dismissive about the town He is from.

Philip said to him, "Come and see."John 1:46

Look at what Philip does not do.

He does not argue. He does not produce three reasons. He does not defend the town, which he could have done, and he does not explain further, which would have been the obvious move for a man who has just been contradicted.

He says: come and look for yourself.

And that is what the whole of John's Gospel then does. It is a book that keeps handing people the evidence directly: come and see, taste, touch, look at My hands. The instinct of the earliest church, at its very first invitation, was to get somebody in front of the thing rather than in front of a description of it.

So hear this said over you, standing at the bottom of a set of steps nobody mentioned. You are able to look at it directly, and forty years of descriptions are not a substitute for one page read cold. That is written into the first chapter of a Gospel, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the teacher in a person, and He does that work in somebody sitting on their own with an open book.

Now let me guard this immediately, because there is a version of this message that is arrogant and useless.

Nothing here is against teachers.

Philip is a teacher in that verse. Somebody told Nathanael. The whole thing starts because a man went and found his friend and explained something, and if he had not, there would have been nothing to come and see.

Everybody who explained that village to Kareem was telling the truth. His grandfather was not withholding steps. Sermons are not a lesser form of anything, study is a real gift, and a person who has spent thirty years on a text can hand you in ten minutes what would take you four years, and this article has nothing but respect for that.

The point is not that descriptions are wrong. The point is that a description is a different thing from a visit, and you have had a great many of the first and very few of the second.

And here is the specific thing you are missing, and it is worth naming exactly.

You are missing the steps.

Not the doctrine. You have the doctrine; that comes through descriptions perfectly well. What does not come through is the detail nobody found remarkable: the odd phrase, the thing said in passing, the aside that is not anybody's sermon point, the sentence that is not in any summary because it is not the summary's business.

Those are the things that go in deepest, and there is only one way to get them.

You are able to read it. That is the whole message of this site's fourth chapter and it is the thing that whole schools were built for. The written word says the unfolding of God's words gives light and gives understanding to the simple, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the unfolding, and He does not require a qualification from the person holding the book.

There was a movement five hundred years ago whose great practical obsession was schools. Not seminaries. Schools, in every parish, so that ordinary children in poor places could read, and the reason was not literacy for its own sake. It was so that a person could go and look for themselves rather than living their whole life on other people's descriptions.

They were not against preaching. They preached at enormous length. They simply did not think a description should be the only thing anybody ever had.