The Context of Fear

The world was born in terror, and the world will die in terror.  The world was born together (in the mind of God), and the world will die together (culminating in the final judgment of God.)

All the elements of the world share the context of the world (for thereby our existence is established) and all the creations of God's handiwork in the world will be judged on their interactions within that context (for thereby our degree of faithfulness to the image of God will be established.)

Humanity is in the image of God, and creation is subservient to that image.  Make no mistake--humanity as the lord of creation is the servant of all.  To fail in our appointed task would be the proper source of our terror--a general condition we share with all of creation.

The very rocks beneath our feet quake in fear of God.  We can scoff at this, believing stone to be inanimate and unfeeling, but that line of thinking will lead to our deciding that we ourselves are but collections of elements.  The teachings of Jesus do not lead that way.

This is why I have written of the very beginnings of creation, and of mankind's collective identity as the image of God.  We must adhere to that identity--treating our fellow humans as ourselves, and as Jesus--because that is the only path of courage.  Indeed we truly are frightened, as is the cursed fig tree, and as are the stones of the mountains that would hurry off to the sea if we would so command in faith.

There is no true opposite to fear, as love is to hate.  A feeling of comfort or of security cannot counterbalance fear, but rather can only distance it or minimize it--sometimes imprudently, which can be its own source of fear.  We can marshal courage against fear, but each is greater as the other is greater.

No, fear is not something to be minimized, since it reflects only our cognizance that we are impinged upon by our contexts--that is, by the very reality that defines our existence.  Courage, on the other hand, is our willingness to engage with that context.  For us, that chiefly is our willingness to be persons melded with humankind.

This is the world of Jesus, wherein we are roused, readied, and reaped--as are the grasses of a season or the mountains of eons.  The world of deluded humankind, on the other hand, is a world supposedly understandable in terms of principles--ancient or modern, churchly or profane--by which fear might be allayed.

And so deluded humanity pretends to understand stories that cannot be understood.  Genesis speaks of chaos having no source but the will of God--a cauldron of chaos from which personalized elements arise--and the denominations chart out systems of theology from which they draw serene awe, having decided beforehand that they are going to extract serene awe.

We are supposed to be scared witless.

And then deluded humankind looks to the other end of  their charted expectations--Jesus' story of the "sheep" and "goats" voicing bewilderment about why they are being saved or damned--when the very story itself (the ultimate "spoiler") has been at Jesus' command disseminated across the globe.  Of course the story is not supposed to be "understood"--it's supposed to scare us witless.

We are supposed to be stumbling witlessly from one attempt to the next to create the person of Jesus in the substance of our interactions with others and the world.  It is a fearsome enterprise that elicits fear.