After the Last Page

You may have noticed how often they disagree. Matthew has me say that not one stroke of a letter will pass from the Law (Matthew 5:18), and Paul writes that I am the fulfillment of the law (Romans 10:4) and tells Gentiles they do not need to keep it. Paul says a person is justified by faith, and James says by works. John’s gospel has me talk about myself from the first chapter, and the other three remember a man who talked about God’s kingdom and kept quiet about who he was. Acts tells Paul’s early years one way, and Paul tells them another. Romans says that the authorities are ordained by God (Romans 13:1), and Revelation says that the beast was given authority over every tribe, people, language, and nation (Revelation 13:7). Some letters say women led and prophesied, and others say women must be silent. Some say neither slave nor free man, and others tell slaves to obey.

The churches kept all of it. They argued about some of these books for three hundred years, and in the end they put them all on the same shelf, between the same covers, the way my people had kept the Law and the Prophets and the Writings side by side. That was not carelessness. It was honesty. The people who knew these books best did not pretend that they all said the same thing.

So when someone holds up one verse and says, The Bible says, you now know to ask which book, written by whom, when, to whom, and why. And what the book beside it says.

You may also have noticed the things that never change, from the first gospel to the last letter. Feed the hungry. Welcome the stranger. Pay the worker. Do not show favor to the rich man in the fine clothes. Love one another, in deed and not only in words. When Paul went up to Jerusalem to settle the great argument over the Gentiles with my brother and my friends, there was one thing they asked of him, and he did not need to be asked: They only asked us to remember the poor—which very thing I was also zealous to do (Galatians 2:10). In the first days in Jerusalem, Acts says, they had all things in common, and neither was there among them any who lacked (Acts 4:32, 34).

That is what lasted, through all the arguing. It was what I had been saying all along.

None of these books was written by me. All of them were written by people trying to remember me, or trying to work out what I meant for a world I never saw. Some of them remembered well. Some of them went places I would not have gone. You are allowed to notice the difference. That is what this book has been for.

Near its end, the last book of your Bible holds out an invitation, not a threat. He who is thirsty, let him come. He who desires, let him take the water of life freely (Revelation 22:17). And then the last prayer, the one my first followers prayed in Aramaic before any of these books were written: Yes, come, Lord Jesus (Revelation 22:20).

They were waiting for me to come back. I would say I never left the places I told you to look for me. The hungry. The stranger. The sick. The prisoner. The least of these.

Freely. That is how the water is given, and that is how it is meant to be passed on.