• Four questions, running the wrong way
• The chain stops at a body
• There is no distinction
• The mission and the messengers
• Asked at the gate, in the rain
• The signs and what they are not
• The man in transit

How beautiful are the feet. Five words at the end of a hard argument, and they are not about anybody’s faith.

Four questions, running the wrong way

Start with the shape of the passage, because the shape is doing more work than any single line in it. Paul has just said that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved, which sounds like a door standing open. Then he asks how anyone is supposed to get to it, and he asks it four times, and each question takes the answer one step further from the person at the front.

Run them slowly. How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed. So belief has to come first. How shall they believe him of whom they have not heard. So a report has to come first.

How shall they hear without a preacher. So a speaker has to come first. How shall they preach unless they be sent. So a sending has to come first, and how beautiful are the feet is what Paul says when the chain finally stops.

That is a regress, and regresses have a direction. This one runs away from the person who did not call out. By the time the last question has been asked, the missing piece is not in that person at all. How beautiful are the feet sits at the far end of four questions that have quietly walked the fault out of the room.

For anyone reading this without the theology, the ordinary version stands on its own and is worth having. If somebody never got the information, the failure is in the delivery, not in the person who did not act on what never arrived. We accept this everywhere else without argument. How beautiful are the feet is Paul saying it about the largest thing he knows.

The chain stops at a body

Now the part that surprised me the first time I sat with it properly. When the regress ends, Paul does not name a principle, or a doctrine, or an office. He reaches back into Isaias for a line of praise, and the line of praise is about feet. How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, of them that bring glad tidings of good things.

Consider what could have gone in that slot instead. He could have praised the message, and it would have been the obvious choice. He could have praised the sender. He could have praised the faith of the one who finally called out. How beautiful are the feet is none of those, and the difference is not decorative.

Feet are the least eloquent part of the whole apparatus. They carry no content. They are the part that gets blistered, wet and filthy, and the part no one thanks. How beautiful are the feet puts the whole weight of a theological argument onto the plainest physical fact in it, which is that somebody covered a distance.

And that is a claim about where the gospel actually lives. Not in the abstract availability of a truth, but in a person who went. How beautiful are the feet means the thing was carried, by somebody, at a cost, over ground.

There is no distinction

Set the fifteenth verse beside the twelfth and the whole passage tightens. For there is no distinction of the Jew and the Greek: for the same is Lord over all, rich unto all that call upon him. Two people separated by every category the ancient world had, and Paul says the distance between them and God is identical. The only variable left in the passage is who walked where, and how beautiful are the feet is the verse that names the walking.

That single clause forecloses a great deal. If there is no distinction, then no one is further away by nature, and no one’s distance can be explained by what kind of person they are. How beautiful are the feet is the sentence that follows once you have accepted that the gap was never in the people.

Which is why the passage has to be read against our own record and not somebody else’s. Christianity has spent long centuries treating this Gospel as a warrant for going, and it has often gone in a manner that put the distance straight back in. It has arrived with an errand entangled in trade and in a crown’s interests. It has treated whole populations as a field to be worked rather than as the Greeks of verse twelve, who are told they are already rich unto in exactly the terms the Jews are. How beautiful are the feet was never a licence for any of that.

Weigh the habit by what it grew. It grew converts who were never made colleagues. It grew churches with a permanent department for reaching people and no path out of that department. It grew the word outreach as a category a person can be filed under for life. How beautiful are the feet cannot be used to underwrite any of it, because the verse praises the walking and says nothing whatever about who is entitled to do the walking.

The mission and the messengers

Here is the teaching this morning actually needs to evaluate, and it is one people hold sincerely and rarely say out loud. The teaching is that some people are the mission and other people are the missionaries. That there is a class of person who may be welcomed, prayed for, given a ministry, made the subject of a fundraising evening, and never once handed the errand themselves. Perpetually the object of the verb. How beautiful are the feet is a sentence that has no room for that arrangement.

This lands with particular weight on trans people, and it lands as a ceiling rather than a door. The door is often genuinely open. What is not open is the rota. There are congregations where a trans person can be loved for a decade, discussed warmly at the deanery, prayed for by name at the intercessions, and never asked to go anywhere on the congregation’s behalf. How beautiful are the feet describes an arrangement with no such ceiling in it.

The Gospel closes the question from the other side. And these signs shall follow them that believe. Not them that are sent, not them that are ordained, not them that are approved by a committee. Christ attaches the signs to belief itself, with no filter after it, which means the errand was handed to the whole room. How beautiful are the feet is what Paul says about anybody in that room who gets up and goes.

This is close to something said eight days ago and it is not the same claim, so the difference should be said plainly. Thou hast been my helper was about the account of a person that gets believed, and about what it costs when a false one circulates. Today is about whether a person is ever sent anywhere at all. Description is what is said about you. Dispatch is whether anyone ever gives you the errand, and how beautiful are the feet is a sentence about the second.

Asked at the gate, in the rain

There is a story sometimes told of a woman of forty-seven who had looked after her father-in-law for six years. He was ninety-one, he lived alone four streets away, and she did his shopping, his post and his garden on three afternoons a week. None of it was secret. She was thanked from the front of the church twice a year by name, and two separate people had told her at length that she was a saint, which she found irritating and said so. How beautiful are the feet would have struck her as a line about missionaries.

In six years she had never once been asked to go and see anybody else. The parish had a visiting rota with eleven names on it and hers was not among them, and there was no meeting at which this was decided. She was understood as somebody’s carer, which is a category that describes where a person already is and quietly settles where they will stay. How beautiful are the feet was being sung over her every year without ever being applied to her.

Then a new family arrived, and one afternoon at the school gate in the rain another woman from the congregation asked her whether she would go round and sit with them for an hour. She said yes, and then asked who else was going, because she had assumed she was being asked to arrange it. She was told again that they meant her. She said afterwards that she had heard the sentence perfectly well both times and simply could not get it to be about herself, which is what a decade under how beautiful are the feet does to a person no one has ever sent.

She went. It was an unremarkable hour and she has no story about it. How beautiful are the feet, on that particular Thursday, looked like forty minutes in the rain and a cup of tea in a house with the boxes still in the hall.

Nothing was fixed by it. She was not added to the rota, and no one revised the category. She was asked again eleven months later, and in between she went on doing three afternoons a week for a man of ninety-one. How beautiful are the feet is true of that walk whether or not anyone ever wrote her name on the list.

The signs and what they are not

The Gospel’s last verse has been put to bad use and it should be handled honestly rather than hurried past. They shall lay their hands upon the sick, and they shall recover. That sentence has been read as a test a person can fail, so that somebody who is not well is told, kindly or otherwise, that something was missing in them or in the people praying. How beautiful are the feet has to be held steady while that reading is taken apart.

Nothing in the passage supports it. The signs are promised to the believing as a body and across the whole world, not underwritten as an outcome owed to any one room on any one afternoon. Christ makes no promise here that a particular person will get better, and this offering makes none either. How beautiful are the feet is about the going, and the going is the part that was actually asked of anybody.

Take the two hard promises of the last verse the same way, which is to say as an assurance to people being sent into real danger and not as an instruction to court it. Nothing in the passage tells anybody to test it. How beautiful are the feet still belongs to the ones who walked, and none of them were asked to prove the promise on the way.

The man in transit

Which brings us to Francis, and to why the obvious reading of him will not do. The temptation with a man like this is to hear how beautiful are the feet as praise for a spectacular career. The record of his life is a list of places and dates that reads more like a shipping schedule than a biography.

Born in a castle in Navarre in 1506. In Paris by 1525, where he met Ignatius in 1529 and took the vow at Montmartre with six others in 1534. Then a king asked for a man for the East Indies, and he went.

Follow the dates and the ordinary heroism of it becomes visible. He left Rome in March 1540, embarked in April 1541, and did not reach Goa until May 1542. That is two years of getting there before a word of the work began. How beautiful are the feet is a fair description of a decade in which the travelling and the labour were very nearly the same activity.

The rest is more of it. The pearl fisheries of the Indian coast. Malacca in 1545, the Molucca Islands in 1546, Japan in 1549. Then China in 1552, where he got as far as the island of Sancian, took ill, was carried ashore into a hut that had been put up to shelter him, and died there on the second of December. How beautiful are the feet, and at the end of them a hut on a beach within sight of a country he never entered.

What the Church did with that death is the part I keep returning to. He did not finish. The last errand failed outright, and the honours came anyway, canonised with Ignatius in 1622. How beautiful are the feet is said over a man whose final journey did not arrive, which tells you the praise was never attached to the arriving.

↑ The order resumes below.