Holy Saturday

Hope deferred makes a heart sick; but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.

Last night following Good Friday services, my mother reminded me well of how Good Friday must have felt to the disciples:  a catastrophic defeat, the end of all their hopes, an abrupt and confusing halt to their daily plans and activities.  They were confused and frightened and alone, fearful for their lives, and (at least for Peter), consumed by the guilt of their betrayal.

It is so easy for us who have not experienced this defeat to see Good Friday in the light of Resurrection Sunday, knowing as we do what happened on the first day of the week as the women came to the tomb.  (Just the thought of it gives me goosebumps.  Can you imagine?)

But for them, their expectations and hopes were disappointed; their faith was put to shame.  The promise of the Messiah, at least as they understood it, went unfulfilled.

They were foolish; even the resurrected Jesus says so:  "Oh foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!"  But their foolishness was necessary.  Their hopes were fanned anew in a way that would never have been if they truly understood that the Christ had to suffer these things and enter his glory.

But even more, the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross seen from the perspective of Saturday really is a defeat of the greatest order.  God died.  It staggers the imagination.  If Sunday did not follow—and the disciples themselves did not understand that it would—how terrible that day would have been, how catastrophic, how disastrous!

Today, of all days, is a somber day of hopeless and sick hearts.  But our true Desire is coming.

Happy Good Friday

More on Semantics

I didn't really anticipate writing any sort of follow up post to last year's rather long-winded discussion on overly semantical hermeneutics.  But it seems like the universal reconciliation crowd are afoot yet again, and the same sorts of arguments are being used.

Hermeneutics is a pretty wide area of study, and there are lots of ways to approach it.  But I think it's fair to say that it's a bad practice to take an understanding of a passage—e.g., because of a moral predisposition against eternal conscious torment—and then bend one's hermeneutic around it.

An additional point to be made is that if you're arguing against conventional wisdom—for example, that the Greek AIONIOS does not mean eternal in the usual sense—your justification needs to rest on considerably more than semantic concerns.  Nearly everyone can admit that words have a wide range of meanings, even the simplest of them.  In my first computer science course, my professor argued that language is recursive:  all words are defined in terms of other words, ad infinitum.  Eventually you'll reach the words you started with.

What this means is that context is crucial.  If the semantics start to shape the context, you're probably barking up the wrong tree.