Sermon Archive
The message of Daniel
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Matins on 16 November 2008
Daniel 10:19-21 ; Revelation 4
Our biblical readings this morning come from two books which ever since they were written have greatly inspired people, but also driven men mad. Words from the fourth chapter of Revelation – ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty’ – are repeated at the heart of every celebration of the eucharist, as the Church opens and offers itself up to a living reality beyond words and beyond human understanding. From today’s reading too, the four living creatures, like a lion, like an ox, like a man and like an eagle, have long been portrayed as the symbols of the four evangelists. But what exactly did all this mean? What had the dreams and visions, and sometimes nightmares, of this strange book to tell future generations about the signs of the times, and especially the signs of the end times, when all would be revealed? This was what drove men, but perhaps less frequently women, mad, as they attempted to interpret Revelation’s symbolism of seals, and scrolls, and plagues, and trumpets, and even more the sequence and numbers of these, in their attempts to determine what history had in store and when history itself would end. All too often such searchers of the scriptures were to end up claiming that the world had in fact ended yesterday.
The book of Daniel, from which our first lesson came, has been a close competitor to Revelation for such frenzied speculation. Probably written about a hundred and fifty years before the birth of Christ, at a time between the plundering and desecration of the Jerusalem temple by a foreign power, and its rededication by Jewish loyalists, it tells the story and records the visions of the legendary Daniel, who lived four or five centuries earlier as a prominent Jew in exile in Babylon. Some episodes from Daniel were to become so familiar – the lion’s den, the burning fiery furnace, Belshazzar’s feast – that it is difficult to understand the history of European Art and Music without knowing about them. But much of the book, especially towards the end, is a baffling mixture of history and prophecy. Some of this, historians tell us, quite accurately records what is now known about the wars, politics and dynastic upheavals of the time when the book was written. But the main actors in this contemporary history are often referred to by names such as ‘the king of the north’ and ‘the king of the south’, or as in today’s lesson ‘the prince of Persia’ and ‘the prince of Greece’; and these cryptic clues were to become an open invitation to future speculators searching the scriptures for signs of the times, avid to identify such Old Testament figures with the principalities, powers and portents of their own age. They were aided in this no doubt by the book of Daniel’s intermixture of angelic with human actors. ‘Michael, your prince’, who is referred to in our reading, was traditionally regarded as the patron angel of Israel; and in the Middle Ages, as the Archangel Michael, he was to become the champion of the Crusaders and also of German knights fighting their eastern neighbours. The ‘one in human form’ who addresses Daniel in our reading, moreover, was traditionally believed to be the Archangel Gabriel, God’s chief messenger, not only to Daniel of course, but also to Mary the mother of Jesus.
What are we to make of all this? One thing which perhaps needs to be said right away is that the dream world we hear of in both Revelation and Daniel is not entirely unfamiliar to many of us today. Some of the specific content of any dream probably reflects what has recently happened to us, what we have been thinking or worrying about in our waking hours; and that will differ not only from individual to individual, but also according to the time and place we live in. The authors of Revelation and Daniel, I suspect, lived in a time and place when their waking hours were less clearly distinguishable from their sleeping ones than most of ours are. They lived in a hot climate, without electric light, or timekeeping, or television, to reinforce their ideas of what was fact and what was fantasy; and their uninsured lives, without security and rights protected by parliamentary democracy, were vastly more vulnerable than ours today. If their dreams seem so much more fantastic than ours, perhaps we should not be surprised by that.
But having said that, the dreams that many of us have, can still be fantastic enough; and from time to time, they may take us not just to the once-familiar scenes of our childhood, but into fabulous worlds we do not know what to make of. It is possible, of course, to understand our dreams in psychological terms, as our sleeping brain’s way of working through what has consciously or unconsciously been worrying or exciting us in our daytime existence; and for many people this understanding can be helpful in providing clues to where they may be going wrong in their living. But whether such a psychological interpretation of dreams proves that they are only ‘all in the mind’, is something about which we cannot be certain. Like the authors of Revelation and Daniel, our understanding of our waking and sleeping lives is inevitably influenced by the time and place we live in; and in our case that is a time and place in which public understanding of the world is deeply coloured by the scientific presuppositions which have served so well to make lives generally more safe and secure than those of our ancestors. A psychological understanding of dreams thus seems more probable to us. But whether there is more to them than that, whether our brains manufacture our dreams, or whether our brains are for example more like radio receivers, and our minds are in some way related to, or part of, something more than our individual brains, is beyond what any scientific evidence can establish. We simply do not know. How to understand this is up to each of us to decide for ourselves. At the end of a fascinating radio discussion last week on the brain and the mind, for example, a scientist working in that area agreed that it was all very puzzling, but said that he preferred a neuro-physiological explanation of it all, because he was a materialist. That was his decision, not as a scientist but as an individual.
Now none of this of course entitles anyone to say that the materialist is wrong and the authors of Daniel and Revelation had a direct line to a true explanation of the meaning of their dreams and visions. Their account was just as culturally relative as that of the materialist. And that, very interestingly, is close to the deepest underlying message of the book of Daniel.
According to a recent biblical commentator, for example, the book of Daniel can be read as ‘a metaphor of the whole Jewish experience of exile in Babylon… The story is above all about the importance of guarding the purity of God’s self-revelation, lest Israel (or any Gentile king) confuse its own image with that of God.’ What ‘the purity of God’s self-revelation’ means here, is not any attempt to describe God in human words, however inspired, but the living reality to which all such human words are an inadequate response. When the Old Testament so frequently opposes idolatry, it is in the form of worshipping not just idols of wood and stone, but also the idols of the imagination: the images of God we create in our own minds when we think we have understood God – whether we do this as professed believers in God, or as professed atheists in order to dismiss God. What the Old Testament’s opposition to idolatry tells us, and also when it gives God the name ‘I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE’, is that we do not understand God.
The Old Testament tells us that we do not understand God. But there is more to its message than that. It tells us that we do not understand God, and that we never will - unless or until we have grown up, unless or until we have matured, into the kind of beings whose hearts and minds have become capable of that understanding. And that too is the message of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation: it is in the word made flesh, not in words, that we may begin to understand, not what, but Who God is. It is in encountering one another in the little things of everyday life, its joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, tears and prayers – and in never giving up hope, in always trying to love and forgive one another and ourselves – it is in living the word made flesh, that we begin to understand not what, but Who, is speaking to us through all these things.
There is again, of course, nothing to prove this but faith; and faith’s only proof is that of experience. And that at least, is the same for us as it was for Daniel, who heard in his heart the words from our reading today: “Do not fear, greatly beloved, you are safe. Be strong and courageous!” And when he heard those words, Daniel ‘was strengthened’.