Without the Camp

The list in Hebrews doesn’t end the way a list usually ends.

After the deserts and the mountains and the caves, after the people of whom the world was not worthy, the writer adds two sentences that turn the whole thing around.

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

They didn’t get to see it finished. And they won’t be complete without us.

That’s a startling thing to say about Abraham and Moses and David. It means the list was never closed. It was left open on purpose, with room at the bottom, and the people on it are waiting on the people reading it.

The very next line is one a lot of people know by heart. Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.

Sixteen chapters later, it’s worth picturing who’s in that cloud. Not a crowd. People, each one standing where the work found them.

A priest’s son dictating to a scribe after they locked him out of the temple. A man who used to hunt believers, writing letters in chains. A shepherd king writing a psalm the week everybody knew. An old man packing up at seventy-five with no destination. A fugitive holding a stick. A widow in a barley field. A prisoner nobody remembered for two full years. A prophet asleep under a broom tree in the desert. A woman who got up and went out to meet him on the road. A fig farmer a priest told to go home. A cupbearer with a budget and a guard rotation. A cloth dealer, and a couple who made tents and held church in their house. A woman with a scarlet cord in her window. A man limping toward the brother he cheated. A woman weeping in a garden early in the morning. A prophet sitting east of a city that got spared, angry about it.

None of them waited to be qualified. None of them waited to be clean. Almost none of them were inside a building when it counted.

That’s the cloud. They’re watching the same road you’re on.

Every entry on that list starts the same way. By faith. By faith Abraham went out. By faith Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. By faith the harlot Rahab perished not. A name, and then one thing they did.

So here’s the last thing to do in this book, and it’s the shape the whole list was written in.

Write your line. One sentence, on paper. By faith, then your name, then one thing you’ll actually do this week. Not the person you hope to become. Not a role. The one thing. Take it from any chapter in this book, or from your own street.

Then do it, and let the sentence be true.

Nobody is going to tell you you’re allowed on that list. Nobody told Rahab either.

Near the end of the same letter, there’s one more line, and it’s the one this book is named for.

The writer is talking about the old sacrifices, whose bodies were carried outside the camp to be burned, and about Jesus, who suffered outside the city gate. Then this:

Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach.

Go forth unto him. Not away from anybody. Toward him, and he’s outside.

And notice the first two words. Let us. Nobody in that sentence goes outside the camp alone.

It isn’t a sentence against the camp. Good was done inside it, and some of the people on this list came out of it. It’s a sentence about where he is. The writer didn’t tell those tired readers to go find a better building. He told them where to find him, and it was outside, where the work had been happening all along.

If you’ve been out there a while, you already know something about the reproach. It turns out it’s the same one he carried.

So go. Not back, not away, and not by yourself.

Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp.