N is for Not

Or is this a misreading of the Christmas story? After all, weren't the shepherds promptly told not to fear? Doesn't that prove that their fear was groundless? To the contrary, what better grounds could their fear possibly have had? It was exactly on target. It was "the glory of the Lord" which they feared, not something else, not some lesser idol. Else they would not have been told they need fear no longer. That is said only to those who first of all do fear God. Only because the Lord was the One they feared were they then released from their fear. Otherwise not.

For instance, elsewhere Luke reports that the religious authorities feared "the people." But from that fear the Lord grants the fearers no relief. Similarly we are told that the disciples fear the authorities. For that fear they are faulted, not comforted. Likewise when they are at sea in a storm, they fear drowning. For that they are rebuked. Yet when their master stills the storm, they suddenly face someone truly terrifying, "Who is this that even the winds and the sea obey him?" For that fear they are not rebuked.

Had Dr. King lived to tell, might he have told us what Jesus did say, that we are not to fear those who merely kill bodies but are rather to fear the One who "can destroy both body and soul in hell?" "Yes, I tell you, fear him," the Lukan Jesus adds for good measure. And Luke's gospel is supposedly the kinder, gentler of the gospels. It is the same Luke whose gentle Mary, in her Magnificat, sings of that One whose "mercy is for those who fear him." That mercy was reserved for the likes of her ("the angel said, 'Do not be afraid, Mary'") and for her "terrified" old in-law ("'Do not be afraid, Zechariah'") and for the "terrified" shepherds (the angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid'.") But then those folks were exceptional. They were fearers of God.

"Fear Not" by Wilhem Morgner

In Augsburg in 1530 some reform-minded Catholics (later called Lutherans), all of them laypeople, had been summoned by the emperor to explain their doctrine, for example, what they were teaching about sin. Every sinner, they answered, is congenitally unable to fear God -- not just to trust God but to fear God, not just unwilling but unable. In describing sin so drastically these confessors had scripture on their side, also the best catholic tradition, maybe even some clinical evidence. God, true God, is humanly impossible to fear, seeing how beset we are with other fears -- unless we are like the shepherds. The clinicians among us have known patients who appeared at first to dread God but on closer acquaintance turned out to be dreading a figment of God, perhaps a tyrannical parent, an idol. Worse yet is the pietistic fallacy that imagines God-fearing can be self-induced. Faked? Maybe. Induced? No. Worst of all, I think, is that sort of shallow "spirituality" which simply dismisses the fear of God as morbid. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was right about American mainline religion, that it is "Protestantism without the Reformation."