2024-05-02 A Meditation on Jesus’ Words of Warning

“4 Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name. 5 For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” (Ps 30:4-5 ESV)

We do not need to concede when it is said, “All will fall away” (Matt 26:31); pained, offended, hackles raised, urgent discomposure: the Christian walk will face trials. Times when our patent blessedness starts to strain. Times when our patent sanity looks a bit askance at affairs. It is almost tempting to concede a bit, to go with the ebb and flow of a less purely “Christian” stand; the Christian’s stand invites hardships, because and precisely because it doesn’t relent even for a minute. Here I stand, I can do no other. Here, blustering right on through the trial, through the poor word choice or rather the blush we cannot hide. Know this, Soldier, that you are cleansed and Holy in your inlets and outputs. Know that no scaremongering nor ghost story can dictate your path in life. Know that all your habitats and haunts already have vouchsafed you unto blessedness, unto sanity, unto any errors now brushed over rightly and properly done up in the Lord’s Ways.

For “all will fall away”: the crunch time means it was, after all (wasn’t it?), hopeless. The ledger just keeps prosecuting and assessing ill virtues away, at our expense, with tireless efficiency, with even the torment that causes us to plead, “I will go with the currents! Please accept that!” But, no, the ill spirit does properly know we are Saved and Christian, and hates even our mock surrender; nothing can rob us from the embrace of God.

And then the flipside, for morn will come (Ps 30:5); strange idylls or exemplary words, and entire platoons are inspired, are caught up in the no-nonsense spirit of Accord, of Peace, of plain Blessedness. Entire soldiering armies get about the business of an inward healing corresponding to an outward meek demeanor, end of bluster and pomp. An end of the vain fetish for Victory, that is, an end for personal aggrandizement, personal pride grinning and responding with the bombs and the tanks. We live in cities encircled and safe; we live in communities assailed on all sides by the enemy’s intelligence, that is, whether the dope and the suicide is a foreign invasion of ideas and suggestions, or whether it is just a spiritual alignment of “their prayers” with “our present-day reality” (i.e. no actual direct or manifest responsibility, just a spiritual affinity), it remains true that Evil exists and lurks, evil suggests and sucks out the life.