lenten blog | March 20, 2025

Wonders of Apocalyptic or Mystery of the Cross

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 20th:  Psalm 63:1-8; Daniel 3:19-30; and Revelation 2:8-11.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Let me first wish all of you a happy first hour of Spring, which arrived at 5:01 this morning.

In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint (LXX), the Book of Daniel is placed after the three books of the Major Prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and before what are called the twelve Minor Prophets.  Daniel is located within the prophetic tradition because of all the dreams and visions recorded in its text.  However, in the older Hebrew Bible, Daniel is placed within the category called the Writings, the other two categories being the Law and the Prophets.  Daniel is not judged to be a prophetic text, in other words.  It is included with other wisdom-stories such as Esther.  Daniel is an edifying story encouraging trust in God regardless of how desperate the situation may be.  The confusion of place between the Hebrew Bible and the LXX is that Daniel presents a whole new kind of literature called apocalyptic.  Apocalyptic imagines the end-times. It tells fanciful stories of supernatural battles between good and evil, the overthrow of the created order, and the victory of the eternal reign of God.

Today’s Daniel selection is one of six stories that are intended to encourage believers to remain faithful no matter how dire the situation because God protects.  They are stories, not history, and the text itself tries to make this clear.  The story is set in the 6th century B.C.E., but this history is all mixed-up.  Darius, Belshazzar and Cyrus, all famous, powerful and well-known men, are blatantly misidentified.  Daniel could not be contemporaneous and get these characters confused.  Since the author is writing much later, either the author of Daniel simply has no access to historical records or is intentionally so oblivious to the facts that he intends to alert the readers that the book is not history but a story of persecuted faith.

Daniel’s stories while told in the future tense are actually from the past.  They end with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the region and the eventual establishment of the Seleucid Empire, which persecuted the Jews ferociously and eventually instigated the Maccabean Revolt.  Where the future-tense stories end, is when Daniel was written, so the mid-2nd century B.C.E., probably just prior to 164 B.C.E. because it gets the death of Antiochus Epiphanes wrong.  Daniel is not about predicting the future.  Daniel is about surviving the present.  The stories offer hope to believers who currently are living through a terrible time of persecution by telling stories of the past where the same things happened and the faithful triumphed over their adversaries.  They encourage the faithful to endure suffering for their faith with the promise that God will intercede against their enemies now just as God had before.  This kind of writing is called vaticinium ex eventu, a “prediction after the fact.”

Daniel’s stories are neither prophetic nor historical, but their purpose is to interpret history.  Daniel expresses a keen interest in current events through the lens that God is engaged with and concerned about God’s people.  The stories emerge from a trust that God is active in the world even when it may seem that God has abandoned it.  Daniel offers a despairing people a reminder of the mercy of God when they need to hear that message so desperately.  And since these were such dangerous times, this message was shared through veiled imagery so as to avoid offending the ruling powers and bringing down their vengeance.  This is why Daniel is judged an apocalyptic writing, from the Greek word that means uncovering or revelation.  This tradition continues right through the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, which is another of today’s selected passages.

We’ll need to continue this discussion, it may even be a part of our Lenten Retreat on April 6th to which you are invited at the Sunderland Church, but how does the cross compare with apocalyptic?  There are stories of God’s fabulous intervention, like protecting three people walking in the middle of a furnace, and then there is the history of God accepting suffering and death in Jesus on the cross.  Both speak to the intervention of God in a hostile world when the faith and the faithful are persecuted by those in power.  Which is more meaningful, and why?  Those are good Lenten questions to consider, and maybe even to carry over into our Lenten Retreat.

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.