Canter Bridge

It is so often this way when the Lord or his messenger confronts a prophet-to-be in the biblical literature. The chosen mortal quakes in fear, falls upon his face, confesses that he’s nothing but a child, trembles in awe of the messenger and his Sender. One recognizes a familar pattern, a classifiable response. It is usually this way when heaven and earth mingle, the men and women at the seam of these two realities suffering the almost unspeakable angst that accompanies the unsought terror of standing at the juncture.

A prophet’s vocation is not an enviable lot. The prudent avoid it, the self-preserving reject it. Those who have carefully assessed their own person with a clear-eyed view to their accumulated fragilities and incompetencies stagger under the shock of having been chosen.

This is as it should be, for human beings are unpromising agents of heaven’s designs.

Yet in the terror, there comes also an alien strength. Daniel narrates it in this way:

While he was speaking these words to me, I turned my face toward the ground and was speechless. Then one in human form touched my lips, and I opened my mouth to speak, and said to the one who stood before me, ‘My lord, because of the vision such pains have come upon me that I retain no strength. How can my lord’s servant talk with my lord? For I am shaking, no strength remains in me, and no breath is left in me.’ Again one in human form touched me and strengthened me. He said, ‘Do not fear, greatly beloved, you are safe. Be strong and courageous!’ When he spoke to me, I was strengthened and said, ‘Let my lord speak, for you have strengthened me.’

Heaven’s first word in the face of our self-disqualification is not ‘strength’. It is rather that familiar word, embraced with difficulty even when we have come to anticipate it: ‘Don’t be afraid’.

Every bit as common as the human response to divine calling, the counter-intuitive command not to fear is so predictable as to be almost a heavenly calling card. Yet its frequency ought not innure us to its potent appropriateness. One is not escorted away from his innate fear because there is nothing of which to be afraid. Far from it, heaven’s mission is almost always a terrifying task.

Rather, the command not to fear is justified by promise of divine accompaniment. The Lord, a shaking human being is told, will be with you. ‘Do not fear’ appears as the promise’s logical corrollary.

In most prophetic call narratives, the strengthening that follows is implicit in the story. In Daniel, it is narrated with uncommon clarity. Daniel finds himself able to converse with his angelic messenger because he is strengthened for his visionary task so that the accomplishment of it moves from impossible to unlikely to assured in the space of a paragraph or two.

Daniel and his compeers are frightened men and women. Thus, the command. Thus the divine company.

Thus the strength. Then angels speak.