Pick Up the Tab

From time to time people talk about picking up the tab for someone else as an expression of the Gospel. Maybe you leave a $20 bill in the drive through at Chick-fil A for the car behind you. You ask the waitress to put the cost of the bottle of wine for that young couple at the other table who seems to be on an anniversary date on your check. Perhaps you drop a $50 bill at the gas station counter and say, “That’s for the next person.” (Of course, $50 doesn’t go so far for gas these days.)

You’ll hear preachers encourage congregants to do such things as an act of love for their community. This sort of challenge might show up in a Lenten sermon series. “This Lent see how you can ‘pick up the tab’ for someone in our community. Let’s share the love of Jesus in that way.”

Kind of a neat idea.

But even more so.

It is more than a neat idea; it is the very picture of what forgiveness is.

Forgiveness absorbs the cost of what someone else has done. Tim Keller in his book The Reason for God puts it this way. Forgiveness is like paying to fix your car after your friend wrecked it. The car is wrecked. It will cost someone something. Either the friend pays up or you absorb the cost yourself. Forgiveness is you absorbing the cost; you “pick up the tab”.

This Good Friday we witness Jesus picking up the tab. We have made a wreck of things: ourselves, our families, our communities. To fix what we have broken would require more than we could begin to muster. But God in Christ, the very one whose belongings we hurt and ruined, pays the tab in our place, in our stead. He picks up the tab. He does it not with gold or silver, but with his innocent suffering and death.

And he doesn’t just cover part of the order or a bit of the dinner bill or a partial tank of gas, he covers it all and then exclaims, “It is finished.” Paid in full.

Two things to think on.

First, spend time as Lent emerges into Easter contemplating the costly love of Jesus. Consider the cost he bore… willingly… to pick up your tab.

Second, use this insight to better understand what it means to forgive people in your life. Tim Keller writes, “Every misdeed is paid for by someone. Forgiveness is when the person who is hurt voluntarily pays for it.” And Keller again, “Revenge seeks to cause pain not a change. Forgiveness seeks to cause change by absorbing the pain.”

Picking up the tab for someone in line is a nice expression of the Gospel. Forgiving someone else in the same way that God in Christ forgives you is even better.

Seems like something significant this week.