Wednesday, 4/28/2021
Week of 4 Easter 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:49–72; Daniel 7:15–28; Colossians 1:24–2:7; Luke 6:27–38

This morning’s Canticles are: before the Psalm reading, Pascha Nostrum(“Christ Our Passover,” BCP, p. 83); following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1–3,11a,14c,18–19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68–79, BCP, p. 92)

In Daniel 7, the prophet receives the first of a series of visions forecasting continued woe for God’s people … to be followed eventually by final blessing. It is revealed to Daniel that there will be ongoing demonic resistance to God’s redeeming purposes in the world ... followed eventually by God’s final victory over sin and death. Having lived through so much grief with his fellow exiles in Babylon, Daniel is distressed to know that even more woes lie ahead. Nonetheless, he is permitted to see that ultimately God’s good purposes will prevail.

Despite his own distress, Daniel blesses us in no small measure, for he gives New Testament writers the vocabulary for their own insights into God’s redeeming purposes. 

One like a son of man. Eighty-one times in the Gospels Jesus is called “Son of Man,” an expression that originates in this chapter in Daniel. In fact, “Son of Man” is Jesus’s favorite self-designation. And though he normally leaves it to his listeners to figure out for themselves that his origins are “from above,” during his final discourse and at his trial he spells it out: “I am [the Christ]; and ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven’” (Mark 14:62; and see also Matthew 26:64; Luke 22:68; as well as Matthew 24:30; Mark 13:26; Luke 27). 

Daniel provides the perfect pitch for getting the Christological balance: “I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven” (Daniel 7:14). Jesus is like us by virtue of sharing our humanity. He is unlike us by virtue of his divinity. “Like us” so that he could bear all our sins and griefs. “Unlike us” so that he could forgive our sins and bring heaven’s reign to earth. Seeing as in a mirror dimly, Daniel perceived that we would receive exactly the Redeemer we so desperately need. 

A beast and a horn. We noted as we read through John’s epistles that New Testament writers are not surprised to find that Jesus’s inauguration of the Kingdom of God has provoked a Satanic pushback. In John’s terms, the pushback in his day means the emergence of the spirit of antichrist and the sending out of many antichrists to oppose the true Christ and his people (1 John 2:18,22; 4:3; 2 John 7). Satan’s rebellion will one day result in an explosion of evil under the Antichrist, the beast from the sea (Revelation 13) … which rebellion Christ will put down in no uncertain terms (Revelation 19 and 20). The apostle Paul explains the same dynamic in terms of a present “spirit of lawlessness,” which will result in the emergence one day of a “man of lawlessness,” whom “the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him by the manifestation of his coming” (2 Thessalonians 2:1–12, and especially verse 8). 

All of this Daniel anticipates in his vision of the fourth beast and the little horn that wages war against God’s people, but whose “dominion shall be taken away, to be consumed and totally destroyed” (Daniel 7:19–26, and especially verse 26). In the short run, Daniel seems to anticipate corrupt and blasphemous rulers in Palestine before Christ’s coming, like the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (215–164 BC) and the Roman emperor Caligula (AD 12–41), who attempt to corrupt worship in the Jewish temple. In the long run, Daniel provides New Testament believers a most valuable perspective on how to live between the first and second comings of Christ: exulting in the victory Christ has already won, battling against doomed powers and principalities in the present, and anticipating Christ’s ultimate triumph over all evil powers in the future. 

A time, times, and a half time. The apostle John knows that Messiah’s people will suffer, but that the days of their suffering will be limited. John uses Daniel’s symbolic “a time, times, and a half time” (three and a half years) to describe the season in which the lady (an image of the Church) is kept safe and nourished in the wilderness from the serpent (an image of a mortally wounded Satan — Revelation 12:13–17, especially verse 14). The number is symbolic of the entire Church-age, which, in the light of eternity’s everlasting blessings, will prove to have been a short season of travail. 

For his part, the apostle Paul has seen the inauguration of the Kingdom of the Son of Man. He has experienced knowing what it is to be “delivered…from the power of darkness and transferred…to the kingdom of [God’s] beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13). For that reason, he rejoices. 

He rejoices for another reason as well, he explains in today’s reading from Colossians. He knows, along with John, that the consummation of the Kingdom still lies in the future. He also understands that before the consummation, the sufferings of Messiah’s people must be completed. Even if it seems ironic to us, Paul, as an ambassador for Christ, rejoices, because he shares sufferings in his ministry, as Christ had experienced suffering in his own ministry. “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24). In Philippians (written probably about the same time as Colossians), Paul explains that we, too, have the privilege of knowing both “the power of Christ’s resurrection” and “the fellowship of his sufferings” (Philippians 3:10). 

As you and I take up our measure of the sufferings of Christ in this age (in whatever form they may take), may we experience them for what they are: a fellowship with Christ that we would not otherwise know. May we, with Paul, “count it all joy” — if through genuine tears — to know that privilege. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: "O Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) - One of the New Seven Wonders of the World" by Jorge Lascar is licensed under CC BY 2.0