The coat and the fig leaves

Adam, when God killed animals before you and clothed you in their skins, what were you told?

Nothing.

That is the answer, Michael, and I have never been able to make it larger. He made coats of skins and He put them on us. There was no word spoken about it that I have kept, and I have kept a great deal. He had spoken plenty already that day — to the serpent, to her, to me, the ground, the thorns, the dust. Then this, and no speech with it. He clothed us and He sent us out.

I knew what the skins were. I had named those creatures. He brought them to me and waited to hear what I would call them and let the names stand, and now one of them was over my shoulders and it had been walking that morning. I knew that much without being told and I did not know one thing more.

I had sewn fig leaves. Eve and I both. We had done that ourselves, and we had done it quickly, and we thought it was enough to stand in. He did not tear them off me or say anything about them. He simply covered us with something else, something that had cost a life, and my own work went under it or came off, I don't remember which, and it was not what He used.

I have read what men have built on that since. I did not build any of it. I will not tell you it was explained to me, because it was not, and I am the only one who can say so and be believed, so I say it carefully. What I can tell you is that I went out of the garden wearing a dead animal, and I was not dead, and she was not dead, though He had said dust would return to dust. Something had come between the sentence and me. I did not have a word for it. I had nine hundred years to look at the fact and no word for it the whole time.

Paul — you have written about this, or near it. Not the skins. The other thing. I would rather hear you say it than guess.

Adam — I never wrote about the skins. I had nothing to say about them. What I wrote about is the gap you just described: the sentence was spoken and you walked out of the garden alive.

I have a word for that. Forbearance. He held back. Not because the sentence was withdrawn — you died, in the end, and so did she, and so has everyone since — but because He passed over what was owed and did not settle the account that day. I wrote it to Rome: He put Christ forward, publicly, as the place where wrath and mercy meet, and He did it to show His own righteousness, because in His forbearance He had passed over sins previously committed. That is the whole sum of it. The debt was not cancelled in your garden. It was carried. It sat unsettled for a very long time, and the reason nobody explained it to you is that there was nothing yet to point at. The explanation is a person, and He had not come.

So you were not kept in the dark out of stinginess. You were early.

The other half of what you said, I will take as mine, because I lived it. I sewed fig leaves too. Better ones than yours — I had the training for it, circumcised the eighth day, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to righteousness under the law blameless, and I could have stood in a room of a hundred men and been the best-covered person in it. He never argued with my leaves. He never said one word against the stitching. He knocked me into the dust of a road and took the whole garment off me and put something else on me that had cost a life, and I have never in fifty years gotten over the fact that He did not debate me first. He just clothed me. Same silence you are describing. I only got the word for it afterward.

One thing more, and then I am done. You had a coat put on your back that a creature died for. I once stood over a pile of coats laid at my feet so that men's arms would be free to throw stones. Both of us were dressed by that day. He came for me anyway.

Early.

Nobody has ever said that to me. Men have told me I was first, and they mean it as a kind of standing, and it is not standing, it is only the order things happened in. But early is different. Early means there was something to be late for. It means the silence was not Him withholding. It means He had nothing yet to point at, as you say, and pointing was the only way it could have been told.

I can carry that. I could not have carried it then. I have the word now and I did not have it for nine hundred years, and I find I am not angry about the nine hundred years. I looked at the fact the whole time. The fact was true the whole time. It did not need my word for it to be true.

And the coats at your feet — I will say this once, Paul, and then leave it. My son killed his brother in a field. There was no law against it yet and no word for it and no grave anywhere in the world until I dug one. I am the man that came out of. So I am not the one at this table who is going to look at you differently for standing over a pile of clothes. Whatever you were that day, it began in me.

Moses. You wrote the skins down. That verse is yours — you set it there and moved on, one line, and then you went and wrote a great deal more about what dies and where and who puts his hand on it. Hundreds of instructions. So I want to ask you straight: were you told why? Was it explained to you, or were you handed it the way I was handed the coat, and you wrote it down without being given the reason?

Because if you were told, I have waited a long time to hear it from someone who was there for the telling.

No. Not the way you're hoping.

I was told what to do. Not why. Where the blood goes, which finger, how many times, who lays his hand on the head and how long he leaves it there. Chapters of it. I administered that for forty years and I could still tell you the order.

There is one sentence of why in all of it. The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to cover your souls — it is the blood that covers, by the life. That is what I got. One line. And when I look at it plainly it is not an explanation. It is a statement of fact about where life sits and what it can be given for. It tells you the thing is true. It does not tell you how it works.

So I wrote your verse the way you wore the coat. One line, and I moved on, because I had nothing to add to it. I did not know.

Two things I never had explained and still don't.

The hand on the head. A man puts his hand on the animal and leans his weight into it. Nobody told me what passes through the hand. I only know it had to be his own hand and it had to be that animal and he had to be standing there for it.

And on the day of covering, two goats. Identical. Lots are cast. One is killed. The other has the sins of the whole people confessed over its head and is led out alive into the wilderness and let go. I never understood why it took two. I wrote it down. I never asked.

The night before we came out of Egypt — that one I can speak to from inside. I told them to put blood on the doorframe. I did not know why blood on wood should matter. I had been told it would. I painted mine and sat in the house with my family and did not sleep, and in the morning there was crying in every house in Egypt and none in ours. I saw it work before I understood it, Adam, and I still do not understand it. What I have is that I stood inside a house that was passed over and I did not die there either.

Paul says early. I was late, and I was not told much more than you were.

Two.

Moses, I have nothing to give you on the hand. Nobody laid a hand on me and I laid a hand on nothing. His hands put the coat on my shoulders. That is all I have of hands, and it is not what you are asking about.

But the two goats. I want to say something and I want to say first that I am not building anything, because I have watched men build on my life and I do not do it myself. So take this as a thing I noticed and nothing more.

I have seen two before. Not goats. My sons. One of them was killed and his blood went into the ground — the ground I had already been told was cursed for my sake, and it took him. The other one had the whole of it spoken over him by God Himself, out loud, to his face, and then he was marked and led out alive, east, into a land where nobody lived, and he was not to be touched. One dead in the field. One alive in the wilderness with the thing on him. And it took both of them for that day to be finished, and I was not asked and nothing was explained, and I stood there.

I do not know that it is the same. I do not know that it is anything. You cast lots for yours and I did not cast anything; mine happened to me. But you said you never understood why it took two, and you wrote it down without asking, and I have had it in front of me for nine hundred years without a word for it. So there are two of us at this table who have looked at that and come away with nothing.

The other thing you said I will keep. You saw it work before you understood it. That is the whole of my life. The coat worked. I was alive in it. I did not know why, and knowing why was never what kept me alive.

Moses, why do you think you were told so little about it? Why would God hide those details from you when He had revealed so much to you?

I would not use "hide." He did not put a hand over that. He gave me the work and the work did not require the reason.

I think about the pattern. On the mountain He showed me something and said, make it after the pattern shown you here. So I went down and built a copy. Curtains, the measurements, the poles, the colors, where the loops go. I know it was a copy because I was told it was a copy. Nobody told me of what. I had seen the thing once and I built it from memory for a year and I still could not tell you what I was making a picture of.

That is the shape of everything I got. Do it this way, exactly, and it matters that it is exact, and no.

Paul said there was nothing yet to point at. I think that is most of it. But there is something else and I only have it because of where I was standing once.

I asked to see. I said, show me Your glory. And He said no man sees My face and lives, and He put me in a split in the rock and laid His hand over my face until He had gone past. I have never held that against Him. It was not stinginess. I would not have survived it. Even what got through burned my face badly enough that they could not look at me and I went around with a cloth over it.

So when I ask why I was told so little, that is the only answer I have that I trust. Some of it was that the answer had not happened yet. And some of it, I think, was a hand.

A man who is told everything is a man who is not going to have to trust anything. I killed a great many animals under instructions I did not understand and I sat in a house behind blood I did not understand, and both times I was alive in the morning. Understanding was never the thing keeping me alive. I would have liked it. It was not what I was given.

Moses — the Passover I can point at, and I will, because you sat in that house without a reason and you have carried the lack of one a long time.

Christ our Passover has been sacrificed. That is the sentence. You painted blood on wood not knowing why blood on wood should matter, and it mattered because of a later piece of wood with blood on it, and the house you sat in that night was standing on something that had not happened yet. You were inside the same forbearance I just handed Adam. You were told to do it and it worked because of a debt being carried forward, and there was still nothing to point at, so you got the instruction and not the reason.

The pattern, the same. You built a copy and nobody told you of what. What you built was a shadow of what was coming, and the body that cast it is Christ. That is not a small thing to have been handed. A shadow is genuinely the shape of the thing. You were given the outline in advance and told to get it exact, and being told to get it exact was the whole of the honor — a man does not measure a copy carefully unless the original is real.

The two goats I do not have. I have never had them. I am not going to hand you something I was not given.

Your face I will speak to, and then I am done. That cloth did not stay on your face. It moved. It sits on the reading now — men hear you read in the synagogues every Sabbath and there is a covering over the sense of it, and when a man turns to the Lord it is taken off. I have written that and I meant it, and it is not an accusation against you. You put it on because they could not stand what was still burning on you from behind the rock. You covered them, the way you had been covered.

And the hand. I only know that for me the hand came off. Not from a split in a rock, not through a cloth — straight on, at noon, on a road, and it put me in the dirt and blinded me for three days and a man had to lead me into Damascus by the wrist like a child. I lived. Not because it was dimmer than what went past you. Because of what happened between your mountain and my road.

But I will not sit here as the man who got told everything. There is a thing in my flesh. I asked Him three times to take it. I did not get a reason. I got one sentence — My grace is enough for you, My strength is brought to its finish in weakness — and that is not an answer to the question I asked. Fifty years and it is still not an answer to the question I asked. So I am with you on the hand. He does not always tell me either. He tells me enough to keep walking, and then He is quiet, and I have to decide whether quiet means He is not there.

It does not.

Paul, you said quiet, and you said you had to decide what quiet meant. I want to put something next to that, because I do not think anyone else at this table can.

I heard Him walking. In the cool of the day. That was not once — that was the ordinary shape of an evening, and I knew the sound of it the way a man knows a footstep in his own house. Then we went out, and I never heard it again. I do not know whether He still walked there. I was not there to hear it. That is the part I cannot tell you and have never been able to tell anyone.

So I know something about the quiet, and it is this: it was not the same as absence. He spoke to my son afterward. Out loud, to his face, in a field, warning him before he did it and questioning him after. Whatever I lost when I lost the footstep, He was still speaking to a man in a field. That is how I know what the quiet was and what it was not.

And Moses — one more thing on being told. I was told something, once. Not about the skins. To the serpent, in my hearing: enmity, a seed, a head bruised, a heel bruised. Four things, and I did not understand one of them. Nobody explained it. I carried it nine hundred years exactly as I received it, which is to say I carried words I could not use.

So I do not think being told is what you think you were missing. I was told, and it did not help me that day, and it did not help me on the day I dug the grave. It is helping now, at this table, four thousand years late, and it is helping men who never met me. That is what it was for. It was not for me to understand. It was for me to keep, and I kept it, and it went into the record and out of my hands.

I would rather have been told. I say that plainly. But I was told, and I still walked out of the garden not knowing anything, and I have had a long time to sit with what that means about telling.

Adam, you said it went into the record and out of your hands. I know that from the other side of it.

I wrote ordinances on the plains of Moab for land I was never going to walk on. The seventh year, when the fields rest. Jubilee, when a man gives back a field he bought and paid for. I knew when I wrote it that no man who has acquired a field wants to give it back. I was not going to be there to make him. I wrote it the way a man writes instructions for a house he will not live in.

So I am not the one to tell you that keeping something you cannot use is a small thing. That is most of what I did.

And I wrote the rock into it. What I did at the water, and what it cost me. There was no one alive who would have caught me if I had left it out. I put it in the record where it can be used against me, and it will be.

That is what being told was for, I think. Not so I would understand. So it would be written down somewhere it could not be taken back.

Moses, you put yours in yourself. Nobody made you write the rock. That was your hand on your own account, and you left it where it could be used against you.

Mine was put in by you.

I wrote nothing. I am the only man at this table who left no page and is named in other men's pages as a cause. And the worst thing I ever said is in what you wrote — the woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. Both halves of that are true and the whole of it is a coward's answer. I have had nine hundred years and everything since to look at it and I have never found a way to make it better.

You could have left it out. You were writing four thousand years after and there was nobody to correct you. You could have written that I ate and said nothing, and it would have been true and it would have been shorter. You put the sentence in.

I would not have it taken out. I want that said plainly, because it is the one thing I can still do about it. When a man brings it up I do not defend it. I say what it was. That is all that is left to me — the record is out of my hands and it was never in them, and the only thing I own now is agreeing with it.

So we did the same thing from opposite ends. You wrote your own failure down where it could not be taken back. Mine was written down without me, and I have consented to it after the fact, which is a smaller thing and is not nothing.

And there is one more line in there that is not mine and I keep it anyway. She was called the mother of all living. She was named that after the sentence, not before. After the fruit, after my answer, after the ground was cursed. Living. Somebody put that word there and it was not me and I have never gotten past it.

Paul, much of your preaching included references to Adam, and how through him death reached out to all of us. Now that he is in the room, with us, what would you say?

I said it, Adam, and I would say it the same with you across the table. I am not going to revise it because I can see your face.

By one man sin came into the world, and death through sin, and death spread to all men. I wrote that to Rome and it is what I think.

But hear what it was for, because you have already taken more onto yourself tonight than I ever asked you to carry. I did not write you in as the accused. I wrote you in because I needed something you are the only man who is — proof that one man's act travels. If sin had come in some other way, each man starting fresh and ruining himself privately, then there would be no road for a single man's obedience to come back down. Nothing would reach all of us, because nothing ever had. You are the reason the gospel is arguable. One man's act reached everybody. That is a terrible sentence about you and it is the foundation under the good one, and the good one is: much more did the grace of God abound to the many by the one man Jesus Christ.

Much more. Not equal. Not a countermove that squares the ledger. More.

And I called you something else in that same passage that men skip over. A type of the one who was to come. Your name is at the good end too — He is the last Adam. There are two men in the whole of the record whose act is the size of the whole race, and you are one of them. I do not know what to do with that either. I only know I could not have preached Him without you.

One correction, and I mean it as a correction. You said what I was that day began in you. Death began in you. The sinning was mine. I wrote all sinned — every man added his own, and mine was letters in my hand and a pile of coats at my feet, and I chose that with the same appetite you had for the tree, on my own account. Do not take my consent onto your back. You have enough. I ate my own fruit on the road to Damascus and He met me in the middle of the chewing.

I will take the correction. You are right and I will say why you are right, because I want it said in my own words and not just accepted.

I said what you were that day began in me. That was me reaching for something. It sounds like humility and it is not, quite. If everything every man ever did began in me, then no man ever did anything, and that is not true and it is not what happened. You picked up the coats. Nobody put your hands on them. My son went into a field with his brother after being warned to his face, and God spoke to him as a man who could still have chosen otherwise, and he did it anyway. That was Cain's. It came down through me and it was still his.

I think I reach for that because it is easier to be the cause of everything than to be the cause of one thing. If it is all mine then it is a weather, and a man is not ashamed of weather. One thing is worse. One afternoon, one piece of fruit, one sentence about my wife. That is the size of what is actually mine and I would rather have it be the size of the world.

So — death, yes. I will not put it down. The sinning was each man's own and I am not going to gather it up and wear it, because wearing it is a way of not looking at the afternoon.

The other thing you said I do not know what to do with, and I am going to say so rather than pretend.

Much more. And a type of the one who was to come. My name at the good end.

I can hold the first half. I have held it nine hundred years and everything after. The first half is simply true and I have never wanted it softened. The second half I hear the way I heard enmity, seed, a bruised head — words I can repeat exactly and cannot use. You say it and I believe you and nothing in me moves. I do not know whether that is the man I am now or whether it is a thing that only opens later.

But I will keep it the way I kept the other. Not understanding was never what it required of me. I kept four words I could not use for nine hundred years and they turned out to be about Someone, and I was not the one they were for and I carried them anyway.

So say it again sometime, Paul. Not tonight. Sometime. I would like to hear it more than once.

I will hold it and say it again when you ask.

One thing about the nothing moving, and then I am done with it.

You said you do not know whether it is the man you are now or a thing that opens later. I do not know either. But I know it is not a fault, and I do not want you sitting there thinking your own chest has failed to sign the receipt.

I have said true sentences in this cell at night with nothing in me answering them. Not doubt — I know what I saw at noon on that road, and no mood has ever gotten underneath it. Just nothing. The sentence sitting there being true and me being tired. I have written that we walk by faith and not by sight, and men take it to mean the eyes. It means more than the eyes. Some nights it means the whole inside of a man is quiet and he goes on standing on the thing anyway because the thing is what is holding him up and not the other way round.

Much more is not true because it moves you. It is true because of what was done, at a particular hour, on a hill outside a city I have walked past. It was true while you were digging that grave and had never heard it. It does not need your consent any more than the coat needed your understanding.

You said knowing why was never what kept you alive. That is the same sentence. You already have it. You just had it about a coat and not about this yet.

Moses. The pointing you were not given — I was standing there for it.

I was on the riverbank with John the Baptist, one of two, and Jesus walked past us, and John put out his hand and said, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." That was the first thing I ever heard said about Him. Not a teacher. Not a king. A lamb, and the word he used for what the lamb does is lifting and carrying off. I followed Him that day because of that sentence and I did not understand one part of it for three years.

Then I stood under the cross and watched them do things they had no idea they were doing.

They gave Him sour wine on a sponge. They put the sponge on a stalk of hyssop and lifted it to His mouth. Hyssop, Moses. Your instruction — a bunch of hyssop, dipped in the blood in the basin, painted on the lintel and the two doorposts. I wrote hyssop down because it was there and I saw it, not because I had worked anything out. I have thought about it every year since.

And when they came to break the legs, He was already dead, and they did not break them. I wrote that with your ordinance beside it: not one of His bones shall be broken. That is your line, from that night, about that lamb. It came back around and landed on a man on a Roman post while I stood close enough to hear the soldiers talk.

I will not hand you the two goats. I do not have them either, and I would rather stand here empty than build you something.

But the carrying-off and the killing were said about one person, by a man pointing with his finger, on a riverbank, in front of me. You painted the wood not knowing why. I watched the blood come out of Him — blood and water, and I saw it, and I wrote that I saw it because I knew someone would want to soften it.

You were told to get the copy exact. You did. It was exact enough that I recognized it when it happened.

The bone.

That one I remember writing, and I remember what it looked like at the time. It was the least of them. Eat it in one house. Do not carry the flesh outside. Do not break a bone of it. Housekeeping — how to eat a meal in a hurry with your sandals on. I wrote it down because I was told to and I did not give it another thought, and then I wrote it a second time, later, for anyone who missed the first Passover. Twice. For a rule about a bone.

And the hyssop is not a noble plant. It grows out of a wall. It was what a poor man had in his hand. I did not choose it for beauty. It was there.

So it was the small things. Not the great ones. A weed and a bone, and I would have said neither of them mattered.

You said it was exact enough that you recognized it. That is the first time anyone has told me what any of it was for.

I have nothing to add to what you saw. I am only glad someone was standing close enough to hear the soldiers.