2025-03-28 A Meditation on In Due Time

“32 Behold, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule in justice. 2 Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a shelter from the storm, like streams of water in a dry place, like the shade of a great rock in a weary land. 3 Then the eyes of those who see will not be closed, and the ears of those who hear will give attention. 4 The heart of the hasty will understand and know, and the tongue of the stammerers will hasten to speak distinctly.” (Isaiah 32:1-4 ESV)

Anticipating the Cross, any proper theology tries to make sense of it, to fit it into its place in the logistics of the faith. However as those “in His camp”, we almost feel that His love for us, our camaraderie, duty and willingness is in itself sufficient for the day. Therefore, just as He felt a “hurry up” to Die for us, we allow the story—per His request—to arrive when it is ready. To lead us through the experience of Life in the community, in the discipleship cohort, in the barracks. Only then to discover: He who had a reformer’s zeal, had to show us in His own body, the consequences of our sins. Does any of it make sense?

Why the Cross? But for the soldier of the faith, compunction, remorse, repentance, is so often a move made outside of the immediate fellowship: God or friend, person to hear our confession, is when needed seemingly Absent. More, Christ’s Cross brought to a fever pitch the back-and-forth about this Morality. Frozen for a moment in time, the nature of our souls is being perfected by His patterned behavior. Any and all sins become Ghosted, shook (as in frightened), absent, properly mourned. We recall the friend alienated, who patiently accommodated our wild charges. These are the early death pains, early because it is still to be revealed just who tore the temple curtain by His sacrifice. It is still to be revealed just whom it is ministering to the community in the community’s language. It is still to be revealed which death-defying or deadly prophecy is ascendant: we are students, first, of a Prophet, Priest, and King, second of His three years of discipling here on earth, third of His death and Resurrection. But all three are important! Only, let it unfold in time, let it be in due season that it dawn on us, no heavy, morose guilt, but a subtle and bright, quieted yet praising, peace and Encounter.

Christ saw a resolution to the temple sacrifices then prevalent, by naming names, going for broke, claiming it for His own Body. Again, the theological structure is not ringing any bells for the soldier just trying to do his or her duty. In and of itself… it is a “given” aspect of the whole narrative; we assume and know, “Jesus died for me, and I need no longer fear death or judgment”. Yet to see this out, to hearken really to the malicious and subtle sins of a Judas, to see the Belief that not all life is spiraling to some evolutionary perfection, but rather with fits and bursts, yardage gained, yardage lost, something Superior is on the scene. Christ with us. A whole architecture of a Future World, now not only nipped in the bud, but betrayed as to its modality and plan. Yes, those saved shall be few… we might say. But never deny that His Resurrection was stronger than that downward cynical tug that acknowledges painful defeat.

We acknowledge, the plan is out, the cat is out of the bag, will the temple authorities ever rest before the entire Movement is dispersed? Only this, that the washerwoman’s faith, the schoolmaster’s faith, the janitor’s, mechanic’s, officeworker’s, and president’s faith, these comprise an Unknown that no temple authority can see or plan around. That Unknown is Resurrection: the mourning for His death built right into the celebration of His refusal to die. If you truly went down that litany unto Dying, then you understand His Resurrection is paramount.

Thus as Children of the gestalt, we never concede to duplicitous expediencies. We are patient as to the Power of our faith in and of itself, with no sinister Plan necessary, no Corrective to a world even more fraught than that of the Nazarene who faced an occupied Israel some two millennia ago. Resurrection is sufficient. Resurrection will come to mean something to each acolyte, in its due season. Until then, pass the peace, love the brother and sisterhood, the Cause is in motion, its alacrity, its early morning warmth from a fire, is Today’s elation and willingness as an immediate consequent, to fight. We truly can say, with existential immediacy, today is as good a day as any to know His Cross, to suffer for His sake, and then also to thrive on His expense account marked Paid.