Canter Bridge

Easily the most frequent divine command in the entire Bible is ‘Do not fear!’, a fact of the literary landscape that speaks volumes about intentionality and purpose.

Joshua trots it out when he and his adolescent Israel have become the object of an unlikely alliance of petty monarchs, as describable by the differences they bring to this coalition as by their hysteria over an Israel. That latter appears almost juvenile alongside the imperial armies that normally come marching through envied lands and the Bible’s pages.

Yet the alliance is militarily formidable and—by any conventional calculus—capable of putting a quick end to the Israel project.

In this circumstance, the divine voice rumbles now familiar words.

Do not fear, for I …

Often the justification is sheer divine accompaniment: ‘for I am with you.’ Here concreteness winds the day: for by tomorrow at this time I will have delivered these rogues into your hand.

Do not fear.

It is an otherworldly word, in that its viability depends upon a perception that only one of the participants is capable of receiving. Yet it is eminently this-worldly in that it undergirds an outcome that will shortly be evident to all.

Do not fear.

It is also the most urgently pertinent of any word that could come from heaven or, for that matter, from this earth.

If life is from one angle safer today than the ancients could have hoped, it is no less plagued by anxiety. Perhaps the steady extinction of certainties that has brought us to this place make angst inevitable when placed upon the bloody predictables of, say, life in the Levant a thousand years before our era.

They had a handful of spectacular ways to fail. We have a dozen, nuanced across the palette of existential colors.

Though it is impossible to establish in just what way Jesus gained what scholars call his ‘messianic consciousness’, there is no doubt that his testing by Satan in the desert—shades of Israel there—was a milestone in the process, since it launches him upon his public work like no other moment except the one where he stood with the Baptist, Jordan’s water lapping at his knees.

Astutely, Satan proffers Jesus three ways to succeed. Failure is so unnecessary, it would seem, in a world where men live by bread alone, the nagging matters of justice and righteousness having gone into eclipse before the secure darkness of met needs.

In each case, Jesus nearly echoes his namesake Joshua by throwing his lot upon divine presence and divine activity.

This must have occasioned a path of excruciating anxiety, of a veritable wrestling with God, akin to that of another forebear named Israel.

There must have been such fear of failure in this audacious choice, like that of pressing forward in the Levant when an unsettled place might have been just as well occupied and, over the generations, turned into home.

‘Do not fear’, the divine voice persists, as though audacious faith were in the end the most secure of choices.