A reflection written for midday prayer, Tuesday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time.
Judges 6:11–24a: The angel of the Lord came and sat under the terebinth in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite.
While his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press to save it from the Midianites, the angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, “The Lord is with you, O champion!” Gideon said to him, “My Lord, if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are his wondrous deeds of which our fathers told us when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ For now the Lord has abandoned us and has delivered us into the power of Midian.” The Lord turned to him and said, “Go with the strength you have and save Israel from the power of Midian. It is I who send you.” But Gideon answered him, “Please, my lord, how can I save Israel? My family is the lowliest in Manasseh, and I am the most insignificant in my father’s house.” “I shall be with you,” the Lord said to him, “and you will cut down Midian to the last man.” Gideon answered him, “If I find favor with you, give me a sign that you are speaking with me. Do not depart from here, I pray you, until I come back to you and bring out my offering and set it before you.” He answered, “I will await your return.”
So Gideon went off and prepared a kid and a measure of flour in the form of unleavened cakes. Putting the meat in a basket and the broth in a pot, he brought them out to him under the terebinth and presented them. The angel of God said to him, “Take the meat and unleavened cakes and lay them on this rock; then pour out the broth.” When he had done so, the angel of the Lord stretched out the tip of the staff he held, and touched the meat and unleavened cakes. Thereupon a fire came up from the rock that consumed the meat and unleavened cakes, and the angel of the Lord disappeared from sight. Gideon, now aware that it had been the angel of the Lord, said, “Alas, Lord God, that I have seen the angel of the LORD face to face!” The Lord answered him, “Be calm, do not fear. You shall not die.” So Gideon built there an altar to the Lord and called it Yahweh-shalom.
There is something terrifying about the future. We are afraid of the unknown, and what is less known that what has yet to even be? Nevertheless, the divine command comes to us precisely as the will of the future. “Go forth,” God told Adam and Eve, “to multiply and govern.” And even before Abraham received the command to sacrifice his own son, he put under the knife his very hopes and dreams at the command that told him to leave the realm of the Chaldeans to become a nomad in a foreign land.
Gideon faced this same uncertainty as he stood before a commanding angel. “Go with the strength you have and save Israel.” Yet even as those words reverberated in his ears, so also the message of the angel’s greeting: “The Lord is with you.” He had reason enough to doubt this message. Yet a spark of hope pricked his heart, and in his anguish and worry he turned to the comfort of ancient ritual. Setting a sacrifice before the angel, he saw it consumed by a heavenly fire, a fire that foretold his own burning fate—how his own heart would be consumed by a passion for the Lord.
We face an uncertain future, all of us. Many of our students, faculty, and staff alike have been at that crossroads where a voice like that of the Lord—the voice of the absolute Future itself—burned our very hearts like Gideon’s young goat. “Go forth!” God said, and we went, no knowing exactly where it would lead.
Yet every uncertain future is also a bold new beginning, a chance to build something new upon the sacrifice of what is old and familiar. This is our call. As Christians, we are the people of the future, those called to go boldly forth. Like Gideon, like Abraham, like our dear first parents, we venture into the unknown yet with full confidence in the angel’s words: “The Lord is with you.”
The Bible often says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This fear is the feeling of having the ground taken out beneath you, of entering the freefall into the unknown depths of God’s majestic and divine plan. Let us not cower from what is to come, but boldly entrust ourselves to that fear that overtakes our hearts and yet trusts. “The Lord will guard your going and coming / now and forever” (Ps 121:8).