Haggai
1:1-6
The
fear of poverty can be as harmful to some people as poverty itself.
Some
people think that Ebenezer Scrooge was modeled on a man named John Elwes. He was a Member of Parliament who had inherited
money from his uncle and eventually had built up an impressive list of real
estate in the West End of London, but he continued to live as frugally as he
could, to the point of stinginess. He
would live in whatever rooms of his properties were not rented out at the time,
to avoid maintaining a house. He went to
bed at sundown every day so he would not have to buy candles. There are stories about how he put off buying
new clothes so long that people on the street would walk up to him and hand him
a couple of coins because they thought he must be a beggar.[1]
There
was more to his story, though. His
father had died when he was four and his mother, apparently, was so scared of
running out of money (even though her husband had left enough for them to live
comfortably) that she eventually died of starvation because she wouldn’t spend
the money to buy enough food for herself, although she made sure her son lacked
for nothing. In the same way, Elwes
believed he was doing all this to save his fortune for his heirs. So he went along walking in rainstorms when
he could afford a cab buy wouldn’t pay for one, nor for an umbrella, getting
home soaked and sitting there wet because he would not pay for firewood to dry
himself out.
The
fear of poverty and the experience of loss may have underlain what was going on
in Jerusalem at the time of the prophet Haggai.
He lived at a time when Judah had been reduced to a province of foreign
empires that kept trading it around every few decades. In his day, the people of Jerusalem had returned
from exile in Babylon and had rebuilt much of the city from ruins into a
liveable place, but there they stopped.
They saw to their own immediate need and comfort, and kept all that they
could beyond that.
Part
of what Haggai, and other prophets like Malachi, would preach about was how the
people withheld funds needed to rebuild the Temple.
“Thus says the Lord of hosts: These people
say the time has not yet come to rebuild the Lord’s house. Then the word
of the Lord came
by the prophet Haggai, saying: Is it a time for you yourselves to live in
your panelled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” [Haggai 1:2-4]
But Haggai knew it went deeper than that.
“Now therefore, thus says the Lord of
hosts: Consider how you have fared. You have sown much, and harvested
little; you eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your
fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and you that earn wages earn
wages to put them into a bag with holes.”
[Haggai 1:5-6]
The people’s withholding was a symptom of the
fears that they had inherited, the troubles that they, as a nation, had
undergone. There was some healing left
to take place and the people needed their confidence rebuilt no less than the
walls of Jerusalem. To use a cliché,
they needed to learn how to move from fear to faith.
When
there has been some sort of trauma, it leaves its mark. On the one hand, it can leave someone
weakened. On the other hand, it can call
forth a greater strength than was previously known. In between there is a stage of caution where the
desire to move forward and the fear of repeated tragedy live side-by-side. That was where the people of Judah were
stuck. That’s where a lot of people get
stuck. It can help to set clear steps or
definite challenges, and that was what the Lord was doing through Haggai’s
words.
Rebuilding
the Temple would be a sign of renewed faith, but it would also be a means for
renewal to happen. You know how someone
learns to swim, right? They get into the
water. You know how you get over the
fear of flying? You sit down on an
airplane and close your eyes and grip the arms of the seat as tight as you need
to grip them, and when you open your eyes you tell yourself that you are riding
on a very tall bus.
A
friend of mine became a widower a couple of years back, and something that he
did the first six months of being on his own was intentionally to go out to
places they had liked to go as a couple.
He said that the first couple of spots were painful, the next run were
awkward, then came the sad ones, and on and on.
When he went back to any of those a second time, it was a little better,
and eventually he realized that no matter what, at least he wasn’t just sitting
at home, staring at the TV. Then one
evening, he said, he went to the movies and had a good time and didn’t realize
what had happened until the next day.
The
problem isn’t so much that the Lord’s blessings aren’t there. The problem is that we see ourselves as
needing more all the time or let our fears or sorrows get in the way of
enjoying what we are already blessed with:
“Now therefore, thus says the Lord of
hosts: Consider how you have fared. You have sown much, and harvested
little; you eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your
fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and you that earn wages earn
wages to put them into a bag with holes.”
How different that is from the awareness expressed
in as familiar a way as the twenty-third Psalm:
“You prepare a table before me in the presence
of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil,
my cup runs over.”
How different that is from the promise that
Jesus offers us:
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory
was not clothed like one of these. But
if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is
thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you – you of little faith?” [Matthew 6:28-30]
There
is no denying that the world is full of trouble, and people get hurt, and all
sorts of things go wrong. Nobody knows
that better than Jesus. No one ever felt
the weight of the world the way he did.
Nobody ever could. We feel our
own burdens and our own sins and our own griefs. He feels them with us and for us, and for all
people, every last one. And it is exactly
Jesus who said to his disciples, and who says to us,
“I have said this to you, so that in me you may
have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have
conquered the world!” [John 16:33]
“Take courage”: have you ever thought about
that expression? Maybe sometimes we can
find courage inside ourselves, but that isn’t always the case. What we can do, though, is take courage from
Jesus’ hand, because it is one of the many gifts that he holds out for us, and
it calms us down enough to see how very many other blessings are already ours,
thanks to him.
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1228112/The-Real-Scrooge-As-Dickens-miser-gets-3D-makeover-meet-MP-lived-like-tramp-inspired-story.html
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