The Blessing My Father Never Said

He was a good man. That has to be said first and it is true, and everybody who came to the funeral said a version of it.

He worked. He came home. He did not drink, and he did not shout, and he was at everything: the sports days, the school thing with the recorders, the hospital when the second one was born, sitting in the corridor with a newspaper he was not reading.

He was not a talker. That is how the family says it and it is accurate as far as it goes.

At the graveside, eleven years ago, standing in the second row because the grandchildren were at the front, his son did a piece of arithmetic that he has never told anybody about.

Forty seven years. And he could not identify one occasion, not one, on which his father had said out loud what he thought of him.

Not once. Not at the wedding, where he made a speech that was about the caterers. Not when the business nearly went and then did not go. Not in the last week, when there was time and everybody knew there was time, and they talked about the football and a man they both used to know.

He is fifty eight now.

And he has noticed something in the last two years that he does not like. When somebody praises his work, there is a half second where he goes looking for something, and it is not there, and the praise does not land anywhere. It goes past him the way water goes past a bank.

He has a good marriage and two children who ring him. He is not a man in trouble.

There is a sentence he did not get, and he has been standing in front of a closed door for eleven years, and the man behind it is dead.

Who hath blessed us. Past tense. Already.

Sit down on that wall a minute, because there is a sentence at the start of Ephesians with a tense in it that changes what you are waiting for, and the Holy Spirit put it there in that tense on purpose.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.Ephesians 1:3

Who hath blessed us.

Past tense. Already done. Not who will bless, not who blesses those who ask well, and not who intends to at some point. It is reported as a completed transaction, and the completion did not wait on anybody's mouth.

And look at the size of it. All spiritual blessings, which is a merism, a way of saying the whole of a thing by naming its extremes: not some, not the ones you qualified for, all of it.

Hear this on the wall. You are not unblessed, and the written word is what settles it, not sympathy. Scripture puts the blessing in the past tense and locates it in Christ rather than in a father's throat, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has held it over you through every one of the forty seven years and the eleven since.

Now let me be careful with your father, because you have been fair to him and I am not going to be less fair than his son.

He was there. That is not nothing and in a great many families it is the whole of what a man managed, and being at the hospital with a newspaper he was not reading is a sentence, said in the only language he had.

He almost certainly did not know it was owed. Nobody had said it to him either, and the arithmetic you did at that graveside would have come out exactly the same if he had done it at his own father's.

That is not an excuse. It is just the shape of the thing, and it is why it runs.

Hear this too, and let it into the half second where the praise goes past. You are not looking for something that does not exist, and Scripture is what says so. What is written says God hath blessed you with all of it in Christ, and the Spirit of God has never once treated your standing as pending, and the gap you have been standing in front of is real and is not the whole account.

And now the part that is going to be difficult, because there is one.

The sentence you want is not coming. Not from him. I am not going to soften that, and every version of comfort that tries to get round it will make it worse, and you would see through it in four seconds.

What is available is not the same thing and it is not nothing.

It is that the thing his sentence would have conferred was never his to confer. He could have said it and it would have been good and it would have been a gift and you should have had it. But the blessing itself was already yours in Christ before he was born, and his silence did not withhold it, because he was never holding it.