No Next of Kin

The form came in a brown envelope with the appointment date on the front, and he has been sitting with it at the kitchen table for forty minutes, and he is on page two.

Name. Date of birth. Address, with the postcode broken into little boxes so that his handwriting will not be a problem for anybody. Doctor. Allergies. He has done all of it neatly, because he is a neat man, and because doing it neatly makes it feel like a task rather than an event.

Then the box. Next of kin, and underneath in smaller print, person we should contact.

He sits with the pen over the line.

There is a radio on somewhere behind him, and the tablecloth is the wipe-clean kind with a faint pattern of lemons, and there is a ring on it where a cup has been sitting since this morning. Outside, a van reverses somewhere and beeps and stops beeping. All of that is happening, and none of it is in the box.

He goes through the list. He has been through the list before, in other rooms, at other tables. His brother, who has been gone eleven years. The friend from the old job, who moved and whose new number he never asked for, because it would have been an odd thing to ask for. The neighbor across the hall, who is kind, who takes his parcels in, and who would be appalled to find her name written on a hospital form by a man she has spoken to about eighty times, all of it about parcels.

He is not friendless. That is the part people get wrong about this. He is not friendless, he is not pitiable, he has a life with things in it. He simply does not have anybody who is close enough to act. There is a difference between people who like you and a person with standing, and the box is asking for standing, and standing is not something you can get by being a decent man for sixty-one years.

So he does what he did last time. He writes the two letters. N slash A. And then, because the two letters look bald, he squares them up a little in the middle of the line so they look deliberate.

He puts the pen down on the lemons. He puts the form back in the brown envelope. He does not feel dramatic about it. That is almost the worst part: there is no drama in it at all, and there is nobody to tell, and telling anybody would be a strange thing to do, because what would he even be telling them.

You know that box, or a box like it. Yours may not be on paper. It may be the moment somebody asks who is picking you up, or who you would call in the night, or the question at the end of an appointment about whether you have someone at home. And you have learned to answer smoothly and to move the conversation on, because the truth is not tragic, it is just true, and there is no good way to say it out loud. Nobody is close enough to your situation to do anything about it.

I am not going to try to be that person for you. I want to show you an office that Scripture takes very seriously and almost nobody talks about, and the man who holds it.

The one with the right and the will

Israel had a word for the person that box is asking for. The redeemer. Not a title of affection, and not a hero of the imagination. An office, with a definition, written into the law of the nation: the near one, the relative with standing, whose job was to step in for a member of the family who could not act for himself. He answered when a family was in danger of losing what was theirs. He answered when a person had been reduced to nothing. He was the one whose name went on the line.

And there were two things required of him, and both of them were required, and this is the whole matter.

He had to have the right. Standing is not goodwill. A stranger who loved you and would have died for you had no place in the case, because he was not near, and the law did not recognize the affection of the unrelated. And he had to have the will. Standing without willingness is a name on a list and nothing more.

That is why the box on your form is so heavy, though it looks like an administrative detail. It is asking a legal question about nearness, and you already know that the people who wish you well are not near enough and the people who are near are not close enough to be asked. You are not being left to represent yourself, and you never have been. Scripture says there is one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a fact that legal and lays it on a person alone at a kitchen table.

Now the line of Isaiah, spoken to a nation who had run out of anybody.

And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the LORD.Isaiah 59:20

Read the direction of it. He comes to Zion. Zion does not go and find him, submit anything, or open a case. The chapter before this line is a long and unsparing description of a people who have made themselves impossible to help, and the answer is not a set of instructions for improving. The answer is a Redeemer moving toward them.

You have a Redeemer moving toward you, and He did not wait to be sent for. It is written in Isaiah 59:20 that the Redeemer comes to Zion, and His Spirit is the one who makes the direction of that sentence land in a room where nobody has come for a long time.

The nearer one who would not

There is a scene at a town gate in the book of Ruth that gets remembered for the wrong reason. Boaz is not the nearest relative. There is a man nearer than he is, and that man is called and comes and sits down, and the case is put to him properly and in front of witnesses.

And he says no. He has the right. He is the nearest one alive. He hears what taking the case would mean for him and he says, plainly and without malice, that he cannot do it, and he steps back and hands the matter on.

Hold that a moment, because it is exactly what you already believe about your own situation, and Scripture does not pretend otherwise. It is entirely possible to be the nearest person to somebody and to decline the office. Nearness by itself has never been enough. Half the ache in that box on your table is not that nobody exists. It is that the ones who exist are not going to act, and you have stopped resenting it, and you have started arranging your life around it.

So watch what Isaiah does with the word, because he does something no human redeemer could hold. Fourteen times in the second half of that book God calls Himself your Redeemer, and He does not use it as a metaphor. He uses it as the office. Thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine. The one with the standing turns out to be the One who made the law about standing.

You are represented by One who took the office Himself rather than delegating it. Scripture says that since the children shared in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise took part of the same, which is the language of a redeemer making himself near enough to qualify, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that stop being doctrine and start being company.

And notice what He does not do with your history. Isaiah 59 does not tidy up the chapter before it. The record of what that nation had done stands there in writing, and the Redeemer comes anyway, into the middle of the record and not after it has been cleaned. That is the pattern and it will not change for you. The record stands. The verdict is changed. You have been claimed by name, with the whole page still legible, by the only relative who never declines the case. It is written that He calls His own by name and they are His, and the same Spirit who wrote that through Isaiah is the one who says it in a kitchen.