The Burning Fiery Furnace Daniel 3:1-30
SERMON FOR PETERHOUSE
In an age such as ours, where events in public life run far ahead of descriptive powers, where extraordinary developments have no recent precedent, commentators find themselves reaching back in history for images, descriptions, explanations. Arguments about climate change reference the ice age, western intervention in the Middle East is viewed through the lens of the Crusades, President Trump’s Mexican Wall is compared to the Great Wall of China, and Brexit, of course, (and this is particularly evocative for me), conjures the spirit and even re-enacts the unfolding of the English Reformation.
This is not merely because vocabulary is deficient, or imagination limited. History helps us get our head around complex contemporary issues, to deal intellectually and (importantly) emotionally with significant events in our lives. The past forms an eloquent commentary on the present, and provides some of the only clues as to the consequences of what we are doing. What are we to do? What did they do?
The Book of Daniel, and in particular the passage we have heard this evening, is one such attempt to explain the present in terms of the past. The account of the three men in the burning fiery furnace is set in the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, some five centuries before Christ. In fact, what we hear is a later adoption of that ancient narrative, probably written around 160 BC, maybe a little earlier. The point is that this story was used to throw into relief events of a recent period of history, conjuring up an earlier crisis to reflect upon and discern the current situation. In 160 BC, Israel was controlled by the ruthless Antiochus Epiphanes, who embarked upon a fierce persecution of the Jewish faith, just as had Nebuchadnezzar four centuries before. Antiochus outlawed Jewish practices, and set up a statue of Zeus, an ‘abomination of desolation’ (to use Daniel’s words) in the Temple in Jerusalem, ordering citizens to sacrifice to it on pain of death. This was, in many cases, by being burned alive - and given that, in the story from Daniel, the three men were cast into the fire because they refused to worship a golden idol at the King’s order, the parallels are clear.
What makes this more than an academic exercise, or poetic speculation, or literary investigation, is that the Book of Daniel is history with a purpose. That purpose is to strengthen those who are persecuted, to encourage those who feel abandoned, to reassure those who doubt. The prophetic and apocalyptic nature of the Book of Daniel very much lends itself to being used in this way. Even Luther, who in general had little time for the eschatological books of the bible, used the Book of Daniel to explain the events of his time, with Nebuchadnezzar standing in for the Turk, or worse, the Pope, persecuting true believers. As regards this particular passage, Christian commentators have seen in the figure of the fourth figure in the flames, one who ‘is like the Son of God’ - a reference to Christ who walks with us and saves us even in the most disastrous and hopeless situations of our life. This lesson from history was already being drawn early in the history of Christianity, as witness St Peter in the passage we heard,
That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.
But is there any value to this, apart from a self-congratulatory smugness? If a historian were to attempt to draw such a parallel, it would be termed idle speculation and bad scholarship. I remember as an undergraduate being roundly criticized by my supervisor for trying to wonder whether King Henry II was just an earlier version of King Henry VIII. The problem with historical examples being used to analyze contemporary events is precisely that they are historic, discreet unto themselves, not merely forerunners of later experiences. Henry VIII, when he broke with Rome, did not have in mind that Brexit means Brexit. The religious animosities of the Thirty Years’ War were not played out with an eye to the Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East. Events just happen. Their context is particular. It can be lazy, manipulative, crass even, to attempt to see history as a prototype of modern events. While it is certainly true to say that history has lessons to teach us, the lifting or re-writing of past events to shape them into commentaries on the present is something to be treated with, at the very least, caution. Even if the events related in the Book of Daniel are historical (and there is a big enough question mark over that) they have clearly been shaped, arranged, molded, to bring out the sense that we have been here before, that there is a bigger picture.
Yet for the Christian, this is precisely the point. Whatever event we are considering, as Christians, we cannot turn up our noses at that notion that there is a bigger picture. The passage from St Peter speaks of the inheritance of Christians which goes beyond the events of this world. Christ gives us a living hope, which is not at the whim of current events, which is ‘incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.’
For the Christian treats history, and memory of history, in a different way to the historian. The historian, when he or she recalls some event in the past, reaches back through time, flicking through the index card of memory to find the event. The event in itself belongs to the past. It is gone, finished. It has no life save for the time in which it occurred.
The Christian remembers in a different way, a way inherited from our Jewish forbears, for whom history inhabits the present. When Christians remember, they draw the past into the here and now, make it real in our lives each moment. That is what we do when we remember Christ himself. Our hope, according the letter of St Peter, is lively, alive, and the resurrection is not an event lost in the past, merely something that happened long ago, far away. Rather, it is a reality that shapes our personal history and the history of the world. Christ himself is not merely an historical figure like Julius Caesar or Good Queen Bess. He breaks out of the tomb of the past, he lives today with us, through us, in us. That is, at basis, what we mean by a sacrament, through which we are drawn into an event of salvation; we are present at the Last Supper, we stand at the foot of the cross; Christ is present in bread and wine.
It is that sacramental foundation in Christ that allows us to be bold in drawing parallels between past and present, to see God working in history. For the Christian, history can never be a series of unconnected events, things that merely happen one after another. We believe that history has a shape, a direction, a purpose. In specific instances, that can be hard to tell. When refugees die in the Mediterranean, when Jews are exterminated in concentration camps, or north Africans starve in their thousands, or indeed, three men are thrown into a burning fiery furnace, it is difficult to see what the purpose is. But even there, in Christ who rose from the dead, and whose resurrection is not merely a distant event, an ancient memory, but who is real for us and transforms us, we have hope. We have hope because we have sense of something larger, something which holds our history within it: Christ, whom we meet and are changed by as really and truly as were his disciples, as St Peter says: Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.
The practice of comparing present events to past events can be enlightening, interesting, amusing. There is an entire BBC radio series devoted to doing just that. But the Christian does not merely pick and mix isolated events. There is a wholeness to history. Christ accompanies our history and the history of the world, burning fiery furnaces and all. That is the thread, direction, unity of human history, and so we, above all, look to the future guided not just by historic events, but by Christ who unites in himself past, present and future.
Sermon preached by Fr Mark at Peterhouse, February 2018
