The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.
Matthew 7:25 (NIV)
The House That Held
Up at the same time. Bed made before she leaves the room. Dog out to the end of the garden and back. Ten minutes with the door shut, which she would not call anything in particular if you asked her.
She was doing all four of those when nothing was wrong. That’s five months ago now, and she could not tell you whether they are what is holding her or only what she does.
Jesus says the rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it did not fall, because its foundation was on the rock. He’s describing the man who hears his words and puts them into practice. The weather in the description isn’t any gentler over that roof. The wise builder gets the same rain and the same wind as the man who built on sand. He can’t see the rock while the storm is on top of him, and the rock holds.
The rock under a house isn’t something the people inside it can feel. The weather is what reaches them, and if you’re in a hard stretch right now, nothing underneath your life is going to announce itself while the rain is loud. Your house standing this morning isn’t a report on how hard you’ve been holding it up.
Jesus puts the test on the person who hears him and does something about it, and the doing happens back at the start, when the ground is dry and there is no reason to hurry. The rock itself was there before anybody built on it. It was there the whole time the wind was working, and it was there on the good days too, doing the same job, with a family walking over it and thinking about other things.
He describes a second house and says plainly that it came down, and he says why: the man heard these words and did not put them into practice. It is the last thing Jesus says in the whole sermon and he does not soften it on his way out of it.
What he doesn’t hand anybody is a way of reading wreckage. The builder can’t see his own foundation either, so nobody gets to stand in front of a collapse and name what was under it, their neighbor’s or their own. What you get is the hearing and the doing, this morning, on whatever ground you are standing on.
Five months. She makes the bed.
A Prayer to Remember
Right now I can’t see what’s holding my life up, and I would like to. Some of what’s under it I put there, and most of it I didn’t. Do the holding in the part I can’t reach. When weather comes for this house, I want to find out you were there the whole time.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
