“The
Day of the Lord” is an ancient Biblical figure of speech. It says that the God who made light arise in
the darkness with the first word, will also have the last. It says that the one who told Moses from the
burning bush “I will be who I will be” was speaking the truth. God will
be who God will be and a day will come when God’s will and our becoming and the
unfolding of the universe will be one and the same. This was what gave the ancient Jews, and later,
Christians, their great hope. They saw a
day of deliverance, when joy and thanksgiving would take the place of longing
and suffering, and justice would no longer be deferred or denied. It would be the day when, as the prophets
said, “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of God as the
waters cover the sea.”
The
promised Day of the Lord was also our ancestors’ greatest dread. Because they knew that there could be no
justice without judgment. And they were
deeply aware that as much as they might like to think that relative to some others
they weren’t doing too badly, God’s justice would require nothing less than the
absolute truth, of everything they had ever done, or thought, or said.
Now
in the modern world, this Day of the Lord no longer has the power to awaken
much hope, or a lot of dread. Maybe we
think about the day of our own deaths with some mix of these feelings. Perhaps we hope for a tunnel of white light
that leads us to a reunion with the loved ones we have lost. Maybe we dread the extinction of our ego
consciousness and bodily life and fear that nothing will be left when they are
gone. But the culmination of history, in
which God comes in person to set the whole creation to rights, to heal and
restore all that is hurt, and lost, and broken, really doesn’t speak to us very
persuasively any more. Instead of hope
or dread, what it mostly evokes in us is a kind of embarrassment.
It’s
not hard to understand why. We are
painfully aware of a long history of the use of this image to threaten and
cajole, to make people fearful and guilty, and then to play on their feelings
to manipulate and control them. Quite
apart from the vengeful glee that some folks take in the extravagant and
sometimes lurid visions of Biblical apocalypse, and even more than the low
comedy of preachers who make precise predictions of the End that is near and wind
up with egg on their faces when the fateful date passes with no more than the
usual crimes and cruelties, I think that what makes us most uncomfortable about
this day of the Lord is the shade it throws on our autonomy.
Because
at the heart of our world view is the idea that we modern human beings have
broken free. The faith of our
civilization is that God, if there is one, will not decide our destiny, as a
species or as individual persons. We
have taken control of our fate, and will become what we create. Our ever-expanding scientific learning and its
rational application to society and the natural world, will guide the endless
forward march of progress. Advances in pharmacology,
with the right attitude and therapeutic technique, will make us relaxed,
confident, and happy all the time. If we
run into roadblocks we will remove them, with no divine intervention required.
Or,
if we are one of those who entertain the thought of a shadow on the horizon, it
is because of human factors that have gotten out of control. Some do imagine a future of overpopulation
and resource exhaustion, climate catastrophe, nuclear apocalypse, and such
things, but if there is to be a reckoning it will be our reckoning with what we
have done. And the thought that God
might lift this curse from us, or that these might be signs of some inevitable
and irreversible transformation, seems infantile, the worst kind of religious
delusion.
So
it makes us embarrassed to read scriptures that suggest that there is another
agenda at work here, one that is proceeding without regard to what we had
planned or what we have feared. We
don’t want to consider that even though we do not comprehend the ultimate
purpose of our own existence, there is one, and it will reckon with us, whether
we reckoned with it, or not. And we
certainly don’t care to hear that it is there for us to find in the Bible.
I
have a guilty little secret to tell you.
On the day I was ordained to the priesthood, right at the beginning of
the ordination service, I knelt on a cushion at the altar rail at Grace
Cathedral in San Francisco, along with eight other people. And the bishop came to each of us in turn, and
the archdeacon of the Diocese of California held out a pen and a stiff folder containing
a piece of paper for me to sign. And
there, in front of the bishop, and my family, and a few hundred other clergy
and lay witnesses, I signed my name to a declaration that read: “I do believe
the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to
contain all things necessary to salvation.”
Which
I find to be a really elegant, and very Anglican, way of handling this
sensitive but crucial matter. You notice
it doesn’t say that all the words of the Bible are the words of God, just that the
whole thing altogether is the Word. It
doesn’t even foreclose the possibility that there might be things outside of it
that can be extremely helpful. It just
says that everything that you really need to know is there. It suggests that there is something necessary
and inevitable about the Bible—again that embarrassing threat to our autonomy—but
it also suggests that we have the freedom to discover for ourselves what is in
it that we need.
That
combination of necessity and freedom pretty well describes the path that the
Bible asks us to take, what the Prayer Book ordination rite calls
“salvation.” On the one hand there is
the warning that the things we are pursuing are not the things that really
matter, and the things that do matter will be all that’s left standing in the
end. On the other hand, it says, here’s
what you need to know to get back on track.
But instead of spelling it out for us in a simple formula, the Bible
gives us rules about agricultural practices, and racy love poetry. It gives us political polemics and grief-stricken
laments, puns and proverbs, histories and folktales, dreams and
nightmares. Most of all it gives us a
story.
And
a story that is moving towards an end is a story that means something. It is always open to new interpretation and
new information because it has faith in the skill and wisdom of the supreme
author, to tie up all the loose ends. That
hope is what gives ultimate importance to all the myriad details of the story
itself. It says our lives have meaning,
and the actions we take matter, and that we are more than bubbles drifting on
the surface of the void, waiting to our turn to burst. We are part of God’s story, with significance
not just for this fleeting moment but for all eternity.
That
suggests a lot of responsibility, but it is a responsibility that comes along
with an extraordinary freedom. This is
the freedom of the apostolic communities, who found in the life and death and
resurrection of Jesus a new way to imagine the whole story, from beginning to
end. They saw that the Day of the Lord
will be his day, the full revelation of his purpose to gather people from every
family, tribe, language and nation into the kingdom that is already present in
his body and blood. This is also the
freedom of the slaves in the Gospel parable, whose master entrusted them with
huge sums, and then went away and left them to do with it what they will. It is a big responsibility, but it is only too
much for the one who fears and distrusts the master, the one who buries his
treasure in a hole in the ground, because he thinks that not being punished is
the best he can hope to do.
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