Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 10 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 17)

Isaiah 10 – Those who make terrible laws and issue tyrannical decrees, refusing justice to the unfortunate will be punished. Then what will they do? Assyria is the rod of Yahweh’s anger, but the insolence of Assyria will also be dealt with. The king of Assyria claims that all he has accomplished has come from his own intelligence and strength (10:13), but he is just the “ax,” not really the power who has used the ax (10:15).

To teach them, Yahweh will send “a wasting sickness” (10:16) on “Assyria’s proud troops” (10:16). On that day “the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the House of Jacob. . .will truly rely on Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel” (10:20). Out of the terrible destruction wrought will come “inexhaustible integrity” (10:22). It will only be a little longer and then God’s fury will end. “He will break the yoke of slavery and lift it from their shoulders” (10:27).

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 17

Early Quakers said that “Christ’s light” was the light that illumined the way, and Christ was telling him, the man who would later become my second husband, that he was just “not free” right now to do what he wanted. I didn’t understand it entirely, but I did understand that I had to be patient, that I couldn’t hope for things to work out with him unless he felt inwardly ready to move on. The thing we wanted, the freedom we sought, had to be given—not seized.

It is not surprising that one of the first things I shared with him was the poem I had loved for so many years. It seemed to speak to our condition too. I must have shared it with him because he wrote to me thanking me for introducing him to these words:

                  I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

                  For hope would he hope for the wrong thing; wait without

Love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the

Waiting. (T.S.Eliot, “East Coker” Four Quartets, III.                                 123-126)

This was what we had to do, because this was exactly the situation we were in. We didn’t know what it was we should be hoping for or waiting for. We had to be patient; we had to lay down our wills, or at least try to. Early Quakers had written a lot on the subject of patience:

“. . .stand still in quietness and meekness, that the

still voice you may hear, which till you come down within, you cannot hear. . . .So be low and still, if you will hear his voice. . . . This gift is free, and offered freely to all who will receive it; and yet you cannot receive the gift in your own wills, but through the denial of your own will. For the light is contrary to the will. . . . As you receive the will of God, you deny your own wills . . . .” (Francis Howgill, Early Quaker Writings: 1650-1700, 176-177)

So we struggled with feelings we could not avoid yet somehow felt we had to set aside if we ever wanted to feel the kind of inner clarity and “rightness” these passages point to. My friend reminded me that the central message of Christ’s life was that crucifixion was not the real end of faithfulness—resurrection was. He encouraged me to see the self-denial we were engaged in as a kind of cross we had been given to bear, a crucifixion of our wills and desires that we had to endure if we wanted to come to any kind of real resurrection in our lives, a resurrection that was life not seized but bestowed. Friends had taught him that. The impatient and willful self, what Friends simply called “the flesh,” had to be restrained:

         “. . . that which could not abide in the patience nor endure

the fire, in the Light I found to be the groans of the flesh (that could not give up to the will of God), which had veiled me, and that could not be patient in all trials, troubles and anguishes and perplexities, and could not give up self to die by the Cross, the power of God, that the living and quickened might follow him” (George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, 14-15).

Somewhere in the midst of everything we were going through—the breakup of our marriages, the abduction of my son, the neediness and desire we felt in wanting to grab on to one another, I began to see something. It had never occurred to me to think of Christ’s crucifixion as something I could connect with in this way. Could it be that this was the way in which it was true—or at least a way? My friend thought it was. Early Friends had seen it that way. I tried to take this view of it. Even if things never worked out for us in a worldly or fleshly way, the death of that impatience in us would surely lead to some good, some kind of resurrected life that would be better than anything we could fashion in our own wills.

Daily Bible Reading: Wisdom 17 and Hebrews 1

Wisdom 17 – “Your judgments are indeed great and inexpressible, which is why undisciplined souls have gone astray. When impious men imagined they had the holy nation in their power, they themselves lay prisoners of the dark, in the fetters of long night, confined under their own roofs, banished from eternal providence” (17:1-2). This passage is very difficult to see at first; it is about the ninth plague suffered by the Egyptians – three days of darkness [see Exodus 10:21-23]. “No fire had power enough to give them light, nor could the brightly blazing stars illuminate that dreadful night” (17:5). The magicians of Egypt could not conquer the darkness, so fear reigned.

“Fear, indeed, is nothing other than the abandonment of the supports offered by reason; the less you rely within yourself on these, the more alarming it is not to know the cause of your suffering” (17:11-12).

While the darkness reigned in Egypt, everyone was paralyzed by fear. 

Introduction to Hebrews: The Epistle to the Hebrews is a very interesting book and one that I think was extremely important to George Fox and early Friends (Quakers). It is full of references to what were seen as "types and figures" [metaphors and allegorical references] in the Jewish Scriptures that  seemed to prepare the way for Christ, for an understanding of his identity and role in the salvation narrative. Fox says in his Journal that "as man comes through by the Spirit and power of God to Christ, who fulfills the types, figures, shadows and prophecies that were of him, and is led by the Holy Ghost into the truth and substance of the Scriptures, sitting down in the author and end of them, then are they read and understood with great delight" (32).

In Christ, in the idea of Christ, and in his substance, a number of things come together: the Hebrew narrative of the creation, and the history and development of God's "chosen people," their Mosaic Law and prophetic tradition; the "Wisdom" literature [rooted in very ancient times and prominent in the Hellenistic times in Jewish history] that saw Wisdom as a female "figure" - beloved consort or spouse of God; and the Logos philosophy that was adopted from the Greeks, fused with concept of "types" and "figures" and articulated by Philo [20 BC to 50 AD] in the time when Jesus was with us on earth and which found its way into the thinking of some of the earliest Christians. 

As I go through Hebrews, I will occasionally make reference to several scholarly studies of the piece: one by Raymond Brown in his Introduction to the New Testament and the other William Barclay's Letter to the Hebrews (1976). Barclay notes in his book that the author and time of composition are hard to determine. The earliest mention of Hebrews is in the 2nd century AD. Early Alexandrian Christians like Clement and Origin loved it, but Eusebius [3rd/4th c. from Caesarea] placed it among the "disputed books." By the 4th c. it was accepted into the "canon" as a work of Paul, but few today think it was written by Paul.

Hebrews 1 – “In the past God spoke to our ancestors many times and in many ways through the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us through his Son. He is the one through whom God created the universe, the one whom God has chosen to possess all things at the end. He reflects the brightness of God’s glory and is the exact likeness of God’s own being, sustaining the universe with his powerful word. After achieving forgiveness for the sins of all human beings, he sat down in heaven at the right side of God, the Supreme Power” (1:1-3).

After this introduction, the author spends time arguing that Christ was/is higher and closer to God than the angels. Angels were very much part of the thinking of Jews in Jesus' time and the origin of the belief in then is also very complex. The syncretism or blending of ideas, traditions and approaches to religious "truth" is something that has been going on throughout history. Some people hate it and some - like me - think it enriches the spirit. And I would argue, without it, Christianity would never have been born. The author writes, "God has never said to any angel: You are my Son, today I have become your father; or: I will be a father to him and he a son to me" (1:5). 

The Son celebrated here is the incarnated Son, the one whose kingdom "will last forever and ever (1:8) and who will sit at God's right hand until God "put[s] your enemies as a footstool under your feet" (1:13). The angels "are spirits who serve God and are sent by him to help those who are to receive salvation" (1:14), but the Son is much greater than they are. He has destroyed the “defilement of sin” and “has gone to take his place in heaven at the right hand of divine Majesty” (1:4).