Second Coming

JUST BEFORE THE FINAL BENEDICTION, the New Testament ends with the prayer, "Come, Lord Jesus!" (Revelation 22:20). When he came the first time, he came so unobtrusively that except for Mary and Joseph and a handful of shepherds, nobody much knew or cared. But he says he will come a second time.

Who knows how he will come, or when, or where. He says himself, "Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only" (Matthew 24:36). People who in search of a timetable try to crack the book of Revelation like a code are on a wild goose chase. People who claim that all who join their sect will be saved and all others lost are wrong. The ones who will be saved, Jesus says, are the ones who feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and the prisoners (Matthew 25:31-46). If you love, in other words, you're in. If you don't, you're out. It doesn't seem to matter to him whether you're a Jehovah's Witness, a Jesuit, or a Jew.

In one of the more outlandish of his outlandish images, he says he will come like a thief in the night (Matthew 24:42-43). We must be ready at all times therefore. We can never be sure when he will break into the world as into a house, when he will break into our lives.

No one can say just what will happen when that day comes, but that it will be a day to remember there is no doubt. The dead will be raised. The Last Judgment will take place. The present age will end and the new age begin. In Dante's vision, the redeemed will shine like a great white rose unfolding petal by petal in the light of glory. In John's, the new Jerusalem will come down out of heaven like a bride.

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," the risen Christ said to his servant Paul (2 Corinthians 12:9). It is in that hope only that we dare say "Amen" to the prayer that brings all Scripture to a close. 

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words  

Science

SCIENCE IS THE INVESTIGATION of the physical universe and its ways, and consists largely of weighing, measuring, and putting things in test tubes. To assume that this kind of investigation can unearth solutions to all our problems is a form of religious faith whose bankruptcy has only in recent years started to become apparent.

There is a tendency in many people to suspect that anything that can't be weighed, measured, or put in a test tube is either not real or not worth talking about. That is like a blind person's suspecting that anything that can't be smelled, tasted, touched, or heard is probably a figment of the imagination.

A scientist's views on such subjects as God, morality, and life after death are apt to be about as enlightening as a theologian's views on the structure of the atom or the cause and cure of the common cold.

The conflict between science and religion, which reached its peak toward the end of the nineteenth century, is like the conflict between a podiatrist and a poet. One says that Susie Smith has fallen arches. The other says she walks in beauty like the night. In his own way each is speaking the truth. What is at issue is the kind of truth you're after. 

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Saul

SAUL, THE FIRST KING OF ISRAEL, had three things going against him almost from the beginning. One of them was the prophet Samuel, another was a young man named David, and the third and worst was himself.

Samuel never thought Israel should have had a king in the first place and told him so at regular intervals. After Saul defeated the Amalekites, Samuel said the rules of the game were that he should take the whole pack of them plus their king and all their livestock and sacrifice them to Yahweh. When Saul decided to sacrifice only the swaybacks and runts of the litter, keeping the cream of the crop and the king for himself, Samuel said it was the last straw and that Yahweh was through with him for keeps. Samuel then snuck off and told a boy named David that he was to be the next king, and the sooner the better. In the meanwhile, however, they both kept the matter under their hats.

Saul was hit so hard by the news that Yahweh was through with him that his whole faith turned sour. The God he'd always loved became the God who seemed to have it in for him no matter what he did or failed to do, and he went into such a state of depression that he could hardly function. The only person who could bring him out of it was this same David. He was a good-looking young redhead with a nice voice and would come and play songs on his lyre till the king's case of the horrors was under at least temporary control. Saul lost his heart to him eventually, and when the boy knocked out the top Philistine heavyweight, their relationship seemed permanently cinched.

It wasn't. David could charm the birds out of the trees, and soon all Israel was half in love with him. "Saul has slain his thousands and David his ten thousands," the ladies would dither every time he rounded the bend in his fancy uniform (1 Samuel 18:7), and Saul began to smolder. It was one day when David was trying to chase his blues away with some new songs that he burst into flame. He heaved his spear at him and just missed by a quarter of an inch. When his own son and heir, Jonathan, fell under David's spell too, that did it. It was love-hate from then on.

Saul hated David because he needed him, and he needed him because he loved him, and when he wasn't out to kill him every chance he got, he was hating himself for his own evil disposition. One day he went into a cave to take a leak, not knowing that David was hiding out there, and while he was taking forty winks afterward, David snipped off a piece of his cloak. When David produced the snippet later to prove he could have tried to kill him in return but hadn't, Saul said, "Is this your voice, my son David?" and wept as if his heart would break (1 Samuel 24). It was exactly what, in the end, his heart did.

He was told in advance that he was going to lose the battle of Gilboa and die in the process, but in spite of knowing that, or maybe because of it, he went ahead and fought it anyway. There are two versions of what happened to him then. One is that after being badly wounded by arrows, he persuaded a young Amalekite to put him out of his misery. The other is that he took his own sword and fell on it. In either case, it is hard to hold it against him for tendering back to the God he had once loved a life that for years he had found unbearable.

1 Samuel 9-30

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words  

Sarah

QUANTITATIVELY SPEAKING, you don't find all that much laughter in the Bible, but, qualitatively, there's nothing quite like it to be found anywhere else. There are a couple of chapters in the book of Genesis that positively shake with it. Sarah was never going to see ninety again, and Abraham had already hit one hundred, and when the angel told them that the stork was on its way at last, they both of them almost collapsed. Abraham laughed "till he fell on his face" (Genesis 17:17), and Sarah stood cackling behind the tent door so the angel wouldn't think she was being rude as the tears streamed down her cheeks. When the baby finally came, they even called him "Laughter"—which is what Isaac means in Hebrew—because obviously no other name would do.

Laughter gets mixed up with all sorts of things in the Bible and in the world too, things like sneering, irony, making fun of, and beating the competition hollow. It also gets mixed up with things like comedians and slipping on banana peels and having the soles of your feet tickled. There are times when you laugh to keep from crying, like when the old wino staggers home in a party hat, or even in the midst of crying, like when Charlie Chaplin boils his shoe for supper because he's starving to death. But 100 percent, bonded, aged-in-the-wood laughter is something else again.

It's the crazy parrot squawks that issue out of David as he spins like a top in front of the ark (2 Samuel 6:16-21). It's what the Psalms are talking about where they say, "When the Lord had rescued Zion, then our mouth was filled with laughter" (126:1-2), or where they get so excited they yell out, "Let the floods clap their hands, let the hills sing for joy together!" because the Lord has come through at last (98:8). It's what the Lord himself is talking about when he says that on the day he laid the cornerstone of the earth "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7), and it's what the rafters ring with when the Prodigal comes home and his old crock of a father is so glad to see him he almost has a stroke and "they began to make merry" and kept on making merry till the cows came home (Luke 15:24). It's what Jesus means when he stands in that crowd of cripples and loners and oddballs and factory rejects and says, "Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh" (Luke 6:21). Nobody claims there's a chuckle on every page, but laughter's what the whole Bible is really about. Nobody who knows a hat from home plate claims that getting mixed up with God is all sweetness and light, but ultimately it's what that's all about too.

Sarah and her husband had had plenty of hard knocks in their time, and there were plenty more of them still to come, but at that moment when the angel told them they'd better start dipping into their old-age pensions for cash to build a nursery, the reason they laughed was that it suddenly dawned on them that the wildest dreams they'd ever had hadn't been half wild enough. 

Genesis 17; 18; 21 

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words  

Sanctification

IN "BEAUTY AND THE BEAST," it is only when the Beast discovers that Beauty really loves him in all his ugliness that he himself becomes beautiful.

In the experience of Saint Paul, it is only when we discover that God really loves us in all our unloveliness that we ourselves start to become godlike.

Paul's word for this gradual transformation of a sow's ear into a silk purse is sanctification, and he sees it as the second stage in the process of salvation.

Being sanctified is a long and painful stage because with part of themselves sinners prefer their sin, just as with part of himself the Beast prefers his glistening snout and curved tusks. Many drop out with the job hardly more than begun, and among those who stay with it there are few if any who don't drag their feet most of the way.

But little by little—less by taking pains than by taking it easy—the forgiven person starts to become a forgiving person, the healed person to become a healing person, the loved person to become a loving person. God does most of it. The end of the process, Paul says, is eternal life.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words