The Barcode at the Finish Funnel

The hi-vis vest is two sizes too big and the barcode scanner beeps every time it reads one, and by twenty past nine he has beeped four hundred of them.

He volunteers most Saturdays. He is good at it, and the run director likes him, and nobody has ever asked why a man drives forty minutes to scan barcodes at a parkrun that is not his own. The finish funnel is a chute of orange cones and everybody comes through it red faced and pleased with themselves, and he takes the little printed barcode from each of them and the plastic wristband, and beep, and "well done", and the next one.

She comes through at twenty-six minutes. He knows because he has known her time for three years, from a results page he refreshes on Saturday mornings. She is taller than he thought. She has her mother's way of pushing her hair back. She hands him her barcode and her wristband and he scans them, beep, and his hand does not shake, which surprises him, and she says, "Thanks," a bit out of breath, and smiles at the vest and not at the face, and jogs on to the coffee van.

Twelve years ago he signed a piece of paper that said he would not seek contact. He was offered it, and he signed it, in a bad year, for reasons that made sense to nobody afterwards, least of all him. He is not asking anybody to excuse it. He does not excuse it. That is not the point.

The point is that there is nothing anybody can do. His friends cannot do anything. A solicitor cannot do anything. Her mother, who has been kind in ways he did not deserve, cannot do anything, because the door is the daughter's now and the daughter does not know there is a door. Even if somebody wanted to help him, nobody is close enough to the situation to act in it. And you know that funnel. Yours has different cones, but you know it: the thing you did, sealed off so completely that the people who love you stand outside it with their hands at their sides.

The two things a redeemer had to be

There is an old word for what you need and it is not a comforting word, it is a legal one, and I am going to use it plainly because vagueness will not help you at a finish funnel. Redeemer. In Israel a redeemer was a relative who bought back what had been lost or sold: a field, a name, a person. And the law was exact about who could do it. Not anybody who felt sorry. Only somebody near enough to have the right. Your neighbor could weep for you all day and could not redeem you, because he was not kin. Only the nearest could act.

But nearness alone was not enough either, and Scripture is honest about that. In the book of Ruth there is a man who was the nearest relative, with every right in the world, and when it came to it he said: I cannot redeem it, lest I ruin my own inheritance. He had the right and not the willingness. Boaz stood second in line, but he was willing, and he took the sandal and did it in front of the whole gate.

You are covered by One who had the right and used it, and you were never left waiting on a man at a gate to change his mind. Ruth 4:14 is written about the redeemer God provided rather than the one who declined, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old settlement made in front of a town and makes it a present fact about a situation nobody will enter.

Right, and willing. You need both, and you have looked around your situation and found neither, and the Holy Spirit knows exactly which gate you have been standing at. Everybody who is willing has no right to enter it. Whoever has the right is not going to. That is exactly the position Naomi was in when she came home with nothing, and this is what the women said to her when it turned:

Blessed be the LORD, who has not left you this day without a redeemer, and may his name be renowned in Israel!Ruth 4:14

Not left without. That is the whole gospel in a field in Bethlehem. You are not without a redeemer this morning, and He is not a distant one. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a line from an old harvest story stand up and walk into a finish funnel and say it to your face.

He came near enough to have the right

Here is what you have not let yourself believe about your walled off situation. Nobody could get in because nobody was kin to it. Well, God did the thing that only God could do: He came near. Scripture says that since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same, made like His brothers in every respect (Hebrews 2:14-17). That is nearness. That is the qualification. He did not stand outside your situation with His hands at His sides. He put on the flesh that made Him the nearest, so that He would have the right.

You have a Redeemer inside the situation already, because He made Himself kin to it, and He has the right to act where nobody else does. I am not offering you a sentiment; I am reading you the terms, and it is His Spirit, not my saying so, who makes them yours.

And He is willing. That is the second thing, and it is the one the man at the gate lacked. Jesus said no one takes His life from Him; He lays it down of His own accord (John 10:18). Nobody made Him. There was no inheritance He was protecting. He looked at the cost of redeeming you and He was not put off. You have been redeemed by One who was both near enough and willing, and Job's old cry belongs to you now: I know that my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25). It is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a verse a suffering man said into a thing a suffering man says.

Now, and I say this with my hand on your shoulder: I do not know what He does with your daughter's door. I will not tell you she is going to turn round at the coffee van. Her door is hers, and God does not force a door, and I will not command another person's will from a distance for your sake or anybody's. What I am telling you is that the situation you thought nobody could enter has been entered, and the record of what you signed is not erased, and it does not need to be, because a Redeemer does not erase the record. He changes the verdict on the man who signed it.

You are standing in a situation that has already been entered, and you are not holding the record of what you signed on your own. Scripture says He was made like His brothers in every respect so that He would have the right, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a changed verdict standing over a man whose signature is still on the page.