The Eggs I Was Going to Sell

We were up to about eleven dozen a week over what this house eats, and eleven dozen a week is not a fortune and it is not nothing either.

I had it planned. That money was going toward a second hand rototiller that a man in the next parish was selling in the spring, and I had been putting it in a tin on the dresser since August, and Toby knew about the rototiller because I had talked about the rototiller possibly more than a man ought to talk about a rototiller.

In November the Marsh family moved into the old cottage at the bottom of the hill. Four children. The father works away and comes back at weekends and the mother is on her own with them five days a week, and none of that is a hardship in itself and all of it is a lot.

Nobody asked me for anything. I want to be plain about that, because in most of the stories people tell about this kind of thing somebody asks, and nobody asked.

What happened is that Toby went down there twice with a message and came back the second time and said, in the way a nine year old says a thing, that they only have brown bread and there was not any butter out.

He was not reporting a crisis. He was nine, and he had noticed a thing, and he said it.

I sat with that for about four days. Four days, thinking about eleven dozen eggs a week and a rototiller in the spring, and I want to record that I was not wrestling with whether to help. I was wrestling with the tin.

We take four dozen down every Friday now and have done for two years. I did not get the rototiller. Somebody else bought it in March and I still see it going past on the back of his truck about twice a year, and I would be lying if I said I did not look at it.

Toby carries two of the trays. Bucky comes as far as the gate and stops there, because there is a dog at the Marsh house he has decided he has no argument with.

Two things called a sacrifice

The writer of Hebrews has spent the whole letter on sacrifice, on priests and blood and altars, and then near the end he uses the word about something extremely ordinary.

But to do good and to communicate forget not: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. (Hebrews 13:16)

To communicate, in the older English, means sharing what a person has. So the two things named as sacrifice are doing good and sharing, and they are placed at the end of a book that has been talking about the real thing all the way through.

That is not a small comparison. He is saying that a person handing something over is doing a version of what an altar was for, and the sentence attached is God is well pleased, which is a phrase the New Testament otherwise uses about His own Son.

You are doing something Scripture calls a sacrifice, and Hebrews 13:16 uses that word about handing things to people. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as being taken seriously rather than as flattery.

And the verse before it says the other sacrifice is praise, which puts singing and sharing side by side as the two things left for a person to bring.

You have not been left with nothing to bring. The written word names praise and sharing as the two offerings, and His Spirit is what makes both of them available to somebody with nothing else in their hands.

What a sacrifice actually is

The word is worth being honest about, because it has been softened until it means being a bit inconvenienced.

There is a moment where David is offered a threshing floor for free and refuses it.

And the king said unto Araunah, Nay; but I will surely buy it of thee at a price: neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the LORD my God of that which doth cost me nothing. (2 Samuel 24:24)

Of that which doth cost me nothing. He turns down a gift because a gift would break the definition. A sacrifice, by the plain meaning of the word, is a thing that leaves a hole.

Eleven dozen eggs a week is a real hole in a tin on a dresser, and a rototiller that goes past on the back of somebody else's truck is a real hole too.

You are allowed to notice the cost, and 2 Samuel 24:24 has a king insisting on it. The Spirit of God is what makes the noticing honest rather than resentful.

And nothing anywhere in either passage suggests a return. Hebrews says God is well pleased and stops there, which is the whole of what is offered.

You have been offered God being pleased and nothing else, and that turns out to be the larger offer. Hebrews 13:16 ends on that clause without adding a single outcome, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land as enough.