Reflection
Zechariah 2
There is a young man in Zechariah's second vision who never gets a name. He goes out with a measuring cord in his hand to take the dimensions of Jerusalem — how wide it is, how long. It is an ordinary job and he is doing it properly.
He is interrupted. Another messenger comes running to stop him, and the reason he is given is not that his measurements are wrong. It is that the city will not hold still to be measured. It will spill past the survey, unwalled, too many people and too much cattle for any line to contain. And the LORD himself will be a wall of fire around it, and the glory within.
The cord was not the wrong instrument. It was simply not the last word.
I read that some weeks ago and found myself back in Papua New Guinea, forty years and half an ocean away.
I worked for a hard man there. He reminded me of the man in the parable — the one who reaped where he had not sown and gathered where he had not scattered. He was demanding. He wanted results. I had been on the field long enough by then that I often acted in his stead, and as time went on he handed me more and more. Authority to decide. Authority to arrange. Authority to hold people to what had been agreed.
The people we worked among had a village mind about possessions. If someone had something, it belonged to everyone — and that logic did not stop at the village boundary. It travelled with them.
A group of nationals were coming to Port Moresby for a conference. They asked us to pay their airfares and said they would reimburse us on arrival. The director agreed. On strict condition: the money repaid when they landed, without exception.
It was one of the few times in those early days that I confronted him.
That's not fair, I said. And I told him why — because I knew exactly how it would go. I would be the one to ask for the money. They would go over my head to him. And he would tell them not to worry about it.
You'll delegate the responsibility to manage the affairs, I said, but you won't delegate the ability to be merciful.
I meant it as a complaint. I had been handed the cord and told to take the measurements, and then told where I could not stop measuring — and the stopping was the part he had kept.
I thought I had caught him in an inconsistency. He was demanding and he was merciful, and I could not see how a man could be both, so I assumed one of them was a fault.
When I came back from that first season, a friend asked me what I most admired in him. I said mercy. And practical.
I had already given the answer. It took the better part of thirty years and a prison and a newspaper photograph before I understood what I had said. He had not been withholding mercy from me. He had been letting me see it go somewhere I would never have taken it.
This reflection has a companion article — Measured, and Immeasurable, on the measure for prison ministry.