Friday, April 10, 2015

Friday, April 10, 2015

Daniel 12:1-4, 13

Daniel is a difficult and often scary book. We group it in with the Prophetic books of the Old Testament — with Isaiah and the like — but it is actually different from those books. The Book of Daniel was not completed until very late; probably the 2nd century BCE, during the Maccabean revolt, as reflected in their similar focus on Jewish persecution, and the holding on to hope in the midst of oppression. While prophetic literature often includes visions and messages from God, Daniel goes much farther than the other prophetic books in his dark, future-oriented visions. Note that in Jewish Bibles it is not included with the Prophets, but with the Writings, such as Job, and the Psalms. We read our section today because it is the first very clear or mature reference to the resurrection of the body. 

We might find the symbolism of Daniel to be difficult, or the language to be over the top, and hard to reconcile with our relatively comfortable North American lives. Some people embrace it by adopting an apocalyptic worldview that, instead of creatively ‘playing with’ apocalyptic passages found in books such as Daniel and Revelation (which I think is suggested when it is included in the Writings, as in Jewish Bibles), develop an unhealthy fixation with the apocalypse. This dangerous tendency fails to take into account the situation of the original writers and hearers, and how apocalyptic literature was intended to give meaning to their life situation, and to give them hope in a God who would one day make things right. That most people who are obsessed with the apocalypse are comfortable upper-middle class Americans is ridiculous. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who did live through a sort of apocalypse in WWII-era Germany, suggests in In the End... the Beginning that we do not understand the apocalyptic because we are not the oppressed. 

Twentieth century Episcopalian thinker William Stringfellow might provide some helpful guidance for those of us who don’t easily read the language of the apocalyptic. 

This American idea about religion — accommodating as it may seem for a pluralistic society —is openly hostile to the biblical description of the church as the Body of Christ living in the midst of the world on behalf of the whole world. The biblical image of the church is, to be sure, that of a stranger in the world, despised by the nations. But the biblical image of the church is never one of an innocuous, isolationist religious society cut off from the actual affairs of men in the world.*

We might more helpfully draw from apocalyptic literature if we allow it to remind ourselves that our religious life informs our entire existence, and will from time to time, cause us to challenge the status quo (or cause the status quo to challenge us). But even when things are at their worst, we hold on to our hope in a God who will ultimately make things right, a God of the resurrection, who breathes new life into dry bones.

- Matthew Kieswetter

*William Stringfellow, “The Secret of Christian Unity,” Christian Century 78, no. 37 (September 13, 1961): 1075.