Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12:1-2 (NIV)
The Crowd and the Course
The folder has three hands in it before hers. Minutes going back to 1994, a site plan with a sightline drawn on it in red, the same six questions typed out again for each new officer, and a clipping with two names in it that is the reason any of it exists.
She’s the fourth. Nine years now. Twice a year she asks the six questions and is told the scheme is on a list, and that the list is long. The first of the three died in 2011 and the second moved away and the third is in a home outside town and still asks her, every time, whether they’ve done anything about the crossing.
The witnesses this letter names died without getting what they’d been promised. The chapter before says it twice, plainly, and then it makes them the crowd standing around the runners. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.
So the ones watching are not the ones who collected. They were jeered at, flogged, chained, sawn in two, and they went into the ground with the thing still promised and still not given. That is who the crowd is made of, and the writer doesn’t hold them up as a warning. He puts them around the track.
The race is marked out already and the runner doesn’t choose the course. Run it with perseverance, eyes fixed on Jesus, who went out ahead of every one of them and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. He is the only one in the passage who has finished and is sitting.
And he did it for a joy set in front of him, which is what keeps the whole of it from being endurance for its own sake. The runners are told where to look, and what they are looking at is a man already seated. Nothing in that folder can be looked at that way. There is no joy in it anywhere, which is exactly why the instruction is to fix the eyes somewhere else.
Everything that hinders is a wide net and it catches things that aren’t sins, which is the part I keep forgetting.
Nothing has been done about the crossing. She types the six questions again in October, changes the name at the top, and puts the old sheet at the back of the folder, behind the other three.
A Prayer to Remember
I know exactly which thing tangles my feet, and I’ve kept it inside arm’s reach for years and called that honesty. Take it off me, Father. Put my eyes back on the one who went first and sat down, and let me run the part of the course I can see.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
