Canter Bridge

The Bible is a passionate book.

This remains true even when its preachers, teachers, moralists, and drivers of doctrinal bulldozers conspire to render it dull.

Yet reality is more interesting than mere passion. Even as the Bible’s long, footnoted, and side-barred story of redemption manifests and incites to passion, one of its currents of instruction teaches its reader not to be ruled by passion:

Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble, or else the LORD will see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from them. Do not fret because of evildoers. Do not envy the wicked; for the evil have no future; the lamp of the wicked will go out.

The exhortation is not ‘weak on evil’ or ‘soft on the enemy’, as the suspicious guardians of our right and their wrong might put things. Indeed, the odd motive clause—or else the Lord will see it … and turn his anger from them—suggests that we should hardly hope that our enemy will soon see his sentence shortened.

This run of counsel in the proverbial anthology would teaches us to value YHWH’s retribution against those who do evil and torment us. Yet we are not to become emotionally wrapped up in it. We do not cheer it openly from the sidelines nor belt out ‘God-is-with-us!’ chants while the guilty choke down their suffering.

The instruction takes us as well the the prior side of such events. When the evil-doers are still busy at their banquets, tooling about in their Ferraris, and sucking the blood of the poor in the most decent, respectable, and plausibly deniable of manners, we are not to envy them. This is not given to us as a counsel to bone up on on heroic psychological reframing tricks.

It is rather a summons to open our eyes and comprehend how deplorable the state of the rich and wicked actually is. Their time is horrifically short. Their lamp burns brightly but is a gust or two from being snuffed out.

The fortunate are, by contrast, those who live justly and long. Their life is the blessed one, their future is secure.

It makes no sense for these to live lives unsettled—in the shape of either jealousy or gloating—by the spectacular flame-outs of the wicked.

That is YHWH’s business.

Ours is this day, this friend, this family, this widow, this community, this unexpected visitor who needs a bit of bread and warmth before he goes his way.

We are too busy to fear or gloat.