On Kafka, and the Effort It Takes When Sin, Righteousness, and Judgment Are Not Yet Settled

 

“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”

— Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

 

The Sentence That Stops You

Franz Kafka wrote those words in a letter to Felice Bauer, the woman he was engaged to and could never quite bring himself to marry. He was not describing a bad week. He was describing the ordinary cost of being himself. The effort of staying upright. The effort of thinking straight. The effort of remaining a person in the world.

Read it again, slowly. He did not say he could have built a house. He said the Pyramids. He reached for the largest thing a human hand has ever raised from the earth, and he said the energy required to build it would still be less than what it costs him just to hold on to life and reason.

That is not despair. That is accounting.

Kafka was telling the truth about what it takes to carry a mind and a body through a single day when the interior question has never been answered. When sin is still open. When righteousness is still unsettled. When judgment is still pending. He did not have the vocabulary to name what was crushing him. But he could weigh it. And the weight was pyramidal.

 

What I Know About the Weight

I know something about carrying weight that does not belong to you.

My mother, Geneva, and my father, Clyde, died of diseases the federal government has since acknowledged it caused. That sentence is easy to write and almost impossible to sit with. Losing them to long, hard illnesses was already more than a son should be asked to hold. Learning that the illnesses were not simply what happened to them but what was done to them, that is a second grief entirely. It does not replace the first. It lays on top of it.

I tell you this plainly because Kafka’s sentence is not abstract to me. There is a version of me that, without the understanding I have been given, would be trying to build pyramids right now. Trying to reason it into shape. Trying to make it fit. Trying to find the place where the loss of Geneva and Clyde, and the cause of that loss, sits down inside a meaningful life and stays put.

I understand his sentiment. I simply do not live there.

I want to say that carefully, because I am not dismissing what Kafka named. I am saying I have been spared from it by something he did not have. Not by strength of mind. Not by temperament. Not by a better disposition. By knowledge.

 

Three Settled Things

When Yeshua told His disciples what the Spirit would do when He came, He named three things that would be addressed, and only three:

“And when He is come, He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.”  (John 16:8)

Sin. Righteousness. Judgment. Those are the three pressures that make a person reach for the Pyramids. Those are the three open questions that cost more than building the largest structure in the ancient world. And Yeshua did not list them as problems. He listed them as the work the Spirit came to finish.

Sin, because they did not believe in Him. One thing, not a catalog. Settled at the root.

Righteousness, because He went to the Father, and they would see Him no more. Righteousness is not something I am building. It is something He finished and took with Him.

Judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. Past tense. Already. Not pending.

If those three are settled, the pyramid I was building in my chest does not need to be built.

That is not a religious feeling. That is a structural fact. The reason Kafka could not rest is the same reason anyone cannot rest: the interior ledger is still open. Sin, righteousness, and judgment are being carried as present business rather than finished work. The body cannot tell the difference between an unfinished account and a live threat. So it pays, and pays, and pays, until the cost of one ordinary day becomes the cost of a monument.

 

What I Hold About Geneva and Clyde

I do not pretend the grief is gone. I do not pretend the admission of cause is a small thing. I do not rush past either one. But I also do not have to reason them into a shape that makes sense of my place in the universe. That work was never mine to do. My parents are held by the same finished work that holds me. The judgment on what was done to them does not rest on my shoulders. It was settled before I was told the name of the disease.

This is what I mean when I say I am grateful to know what I know. Not grateful in a sentimental way. Grateful in the way a man is grateful when he sets down a stone he did not realize he was carrying.

I do not push. I do not pull. I do not restrain.

I do not push the grief away. I do not pull meaning out of it that is not there. I do not restrain it from being what it is. I let it be a true thing, and I let the settled things be true underneath it. Both at once. The weight rests on ground that was laid before the weight arrived.

 

For Kafka, and for Whoever Is Reading This

I do not know what Kafka was given at the end. That is not mine to say. But I know what he named, and I know that what he named is real, and I know that millions of people are living inside that sentence right now without knowing they are living inside it. They are building pyramids every morning before breakfast. They are paying monumental cost for ordinary days. They do not know that the ledger they are carrying has already been closed.

The gospel, when it is actually the gospel, is not a command to build a better pyramid. It is not a better method for clinging to life and reason. It is the announcement that the three things that cost the most, sin, righteousness, judgment, are not yours to resolve. They have been resolved. The Spirit came to tell you so.

If that announcement lands in a person, the arithmetic changes. The day still costs something. The grief still weighs. The body still tires. But no one is building the Pyramids anymore. No one has to.

 

The effort Kafka described is the real cost of carrying what was never yours to carry. The gospel is the word that the carrying is finished.

 

The Gospel Revolution  •  Mike Williams Ministries

William Ethan Massengill  •  Michael Lilborn Williams  •  Daniel Thomas Rouse

Published by Audrey Williams