2023-07-07 A Meditation on Readiness

“34 “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Mt 6:34 ESV)

It’s a state of readiness that glimpses the open-ended question, the makeshift operations, the complete realization of a new state, war. It is no guarantee we shall prevail. Yet we have in our arsenal the best of the best, a psychological-societal training ground with Strong Attributes. We are strong, the fruit of a Faith that exists post-mortem, post-diagnosis, post-betrayal, post-uncertainty. This is not that we are more comfortable as bombs fall on all sides, but that we never lived down the imbued sense we are doing something right.

We are calm, whilst the world goes haywire. We are in the barracks, no longer all according to timeline and plan, but making hasty important decisions, adopting any spirit “out there” that can show a little healing power, a little unexpected beauty, some cleanness of habit, mind expansive unto a world upwards and uplifting. For such spirit was ours, and our proper invention and gift. Such is our confidence in Christ Jesus, the role of One Man equal to that of an army, word propagating as to what one person in the crew got up to.

And the friendly, the post-war glimpse of something kindly and smiling, gruff but smiling, on those we rub up against, the peer, the friendly, the fellow in arms and under this flag called Christ. That is enough to win the war. That is enough to posit a day advanced, far ahead, that bears the spiritual gifts of this generation’s sacrifices. That holds close our own eternal life, for we are one or two degrees separated from the martyrs and from the Jesus-like and from the motivated fighter. They make symbols; we are glad happy to have one such as this: uncautious, unafraid, undoubting: we shall prevail.

Then the airy nothingness, the doubts that any one Teaching can be a concrete casus belli. We are stepping up a air ladder and staircase. One day we find ourselves scrounging for something, anything, to hold on to. To prove our cause. To legitimize our fight. To be our uniform and our belonging: we are in that soldiers’ digs of service and humility, submission and supervision, both the new recruit and the seasoned drill sergeant.

In the Spirit, in the recipient role regarding Grace, suddenly our cause is manifest: to befriend the atheist or one of alternative religion. We pray, and leap forth shining and flashing for the day, glimmering and high and mighty; we did find a Cause. We did find a Quest. We did find a Team. It is to enter that commission under our own recognisance: “I am busy; can you get a few things done for me?”. We yearn to be useful, and are treated as sons, the Father ducking out after some flattery. He is making Himself vulnerable, that we might fill the void, the space granted, the allowance made. Even He, God the Father, the Holy Woman and Man called Faith, called Jesus, shows Himself to be the inspiration of Jesus of Nazareth. To be the inspiration of that Cruciform walk. To be servant—in a way only God can be—to the same people and Cause, helping the Son or the Daughter, redeeming the sinner and minting the holy.

Grace is simply the message of reckoning with the ministration of Law, and dwelling near to a strange combination: freed from Law, yet not Lawless; not self-indulgent; not sinful. It is an End to legalistic frameworks and religion. It lives on a cusp, power symbols and eruptions as Law is exchanged for Grace. The world erupts. The world flashes forth, cutting edge, no, bleeding edge: as simple as the discovery that all our internalized demand and Law becomes the very thing we repent of, that we might life more fully in an adaptive and form fitting reality. We become servant to the gathering and to the community. We do not judge others, but try to testify to our own humility as servants formerly under the Law, but now boasting in Jesus, who with His blood legitimized the stark future-thought: we have no time to fuss around observances and rigor; we are in a liminal light and Beloved as such. We shall bear witness even as the jackals surround. We shall be made New and wrestler with the Law, the better to know that nefarious monster, and therefore the better to know our Gracious deeds much better fulfill the intention than the exasperated encoding on tablets of the Law.