“The angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them. They were terrified. But the angel said to them: “Fear not!…I bring you good news and it shall be a great joy to all peoples…To you this day is born…a saviour.” (Luke 2).
Before a perceived danger, it is natural to feel fear for one’s personal safety and well-being. Fear alerts us, readies us for defence. Fear, however, like all things, can possess us. We can allow it to possess us. In this, fear turns inward upon itself. It becomes not a sentinel of danger, merely fear itself, a fearing of no-thing actual. It is fear unleashed from its protective moorings, scanning the abyss of sheer potentialities. It is here, in this inwardness, that fear reveals its roots. The soul, in its depths, “knows”[i] the boundlessness of being, the cosmic scale of possibilities, and as well, its individuated limitedness, its finitude, its mortality. Man may with trust, with a grounding self-confidence, plot in fortitude, prudence, and hope to extend himself in every direction, but never can he do so without end. Ultimately then, every fear encapsulates that one primal fear—death. The Hebrew scriptures say no man may look upon God and live. They say also the “fear” of God is the beginning of wisdom. It is sin which eyes God as a threat, that denies the trustworthiness[ii] of God, that refuses to see in him the care and love of either father or saviour. It is sin that would defend itself before God, seek to defeat, to neutralize God. But the wise man fears God not as a threat but as the unsurpassable power that defines his and every other fleeting moment. Wisdom knows the sheer power of the Font of all being is so beyond comprehension, so, before the mind and heart of man, tremendous in majesty that man must draw back in awe, quiver in astonishment. Wisdom knows words—those definiens of communicability, internal and external—fail. Here man arms himself not. He kneels. He worships. The biblical notion of the fear of God, of the immortal One, is the obverse of the fear of death for fear here bows to the infinite, accepts finitude as gift, and trusts in the giver. It humbly appreciates infinity’s dwarfing of the finite. It embraces its concrete factuality, its pointed, blunt, and ultimate ultimatum: freedom or fate, thou may seek to conquer one or the other.[iii] Thus, wisdom knows its freedom, and hopes beyond fate. Man supplicates God to save him, spare him, release him, redeem him from his fated end and from every form of death. Man prays to partake of divine boundlessness, to have of God’s aid, his grace, in the moments of challenge, and to rest in immortality. To whom else can man make such fervent prayer? If fear, however, is part of the nature of man, why does this angel in Luke’s telling tell us to fear not? Continue reading →
