The Day of Yahweh
All the Faithful Departed Scripture Readings
Today, for this commemoration of all the faithful departed, I want to concentrate on a phrase of just a few words from this morning’s gospel reading, and that is “the day.” It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of that phrase. We find it used in ancient traditions, some say up to five thousand years old—a thousand years before written texts appeared in Israel. As you can imagine, the meaning of this “day” and the ways it’s been understood have evolved over the millennia, and the way we understand it today is far different from how it was used originally, or during Jesus’s time, or even a hundred years ago. It’s an example of what’s known as a “prophetic” statement, where a scriptural concept that originated in the far-distant past remains continually open to deeper and broader interpretations as human history progresses.
Let’s talk about “the day.” What is it, and how has it evolved? From the beginning, “the day” has consistently been understood as the day of fulfillment, and the actor in this scenario has always been understood to be Yahweh God. It is, therefore, the “Day of Yahweh.” The object of that day has always been seen as the fulfillment of God’s promise. From the time of Abraham, the promise was that he would be the father of a great nation in the land of Canaan. That Day of Yahweh would be a day of tribal significance, fulfilled in the birth of Isaac and his twelve children, particularly Jacob, known as Israel, and his descendants, the peoples of the twelve tribes. Then, once that nation had found itself enslaved in Egypt, the Day of Yahweh was understood as having national significance, starting with their liberation from slavery in the Exodus and ending with the defeat of their enemies and their entry into the promised land.
From their settling in the promised land onward, the prophets of Israel continued to preach about the Day of Yahweh, tailoring it to their particular message. As it always had been, the Day of Yahweh would come when all of Israel’s enemies would have been defeated forever. After Solomon, when Israel and Judah went their separate ways, the Day of Yahweh would come when Israel was again one nation, once and for all. After the exile, the Day of Yahweh would be when the faithful would return, and Israel would be restored at last. In every case, there was a finality to the Day of Yahweh, when the triumph of evil would cease, trials would come to an end, and the faithful would receive their reward. For many of the prophets, the Day of Yahweh signaled the destruction of the status quo, with not only tribal, national, or universal impact, it often had cosmic consequences. They spoke of the darkening of the sun, moon, and stars, earthquakes, roaring seas, and fire, all signs indicating divine intervention and judgment. The Day of Yahweh became, if not the end of the world, at least the end of the world as they knew it.
By Jesus’s time, the Day of Yahweh was the subject of universal speculation, at least in Judea. It was clear to all that it would involve the coming of the Messiah, a transcendent king, who would put an end to the evils that beset them and usher in a new day when Yahweh would reign over all peoples in peace and goodness. This is what Jesus’s disciples believed, this is what they were anxious to see, and this is the role they expected the Messiah to play as he ushered in the coming age. They wanted to have a ringside seat to witness it all when it came to pass. Jesus himself had a hard time dissuading them from interpreting every disruption they experienced as a sign that the Day of Yahweh had come.
Even after Jesus’s death and resurrection, the shadow of the Day of Yahweh hung over the nascent Church. They saw it in their rejection by the Jews in Israel. They saw it in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans. They saw it in the persecutions under Diocletian and the Romans. They looked for it to arrive with the coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven. They longed for the Day of Yahweh when there’d be a new heaven and a new earth. Ever since, it’s never been far from Christian thought, having turned it into a combination of the end of the world and the Last Judgment. So, for as much as five thousand years, people of faith have been chasing around the concept of the Day of Yahweh, unaware that it is, like so much of our Scripture, a prophetic event. As such, it’s not the exclusive property of the future. It belongs equally to the past and to the present as well. How can this be?
Remember Matthew’s description of the death of Jesus? “From the sixth hour onwards, there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour,” he writes. “Then Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And all at once, the veil of the temple was torn this way and that from the top to the bottom, and the earth shook, and the rocks parted asunder; and the graves were opened, and many bodies arose out of them…” All that imagery was pulled from the prophets’ descriptions of the Day of Yahweh. For Matthew and the early Christians, the death of the Messiah was the watershed point between what was and what was to come. That was the point when Yahweh intervened, and as promised, the old order passed away to make room for what was entirely new. For Christians, that was the end of the world and the Last Judgment. Christ’s passage from death to life put an end to the universe of futility and fear. Likewise, it was a judgment because those who believed were liberated from futility and fear, while those who refused remained in their desperate, hopeless state.
The Day of Yahweh belongs to the present, as well. Every day, we get to judge: am I going to live today in faith, or in fear, in trust, or in despair? And, every day, we get the opportunity to decide whether we’re going to live it as a new beginning, empowered by the grace of God, or live it stuck in the old habits of self-reliance and dependence on the empty promises of wealth, power, and prestige. When we look at it from that perspective, we see that every day—really, every minute of every day—is a moment of the Day of Yahweh.
It’s no surprise to learn that the Day of Yahweh also awaits us in the future. After all, we’ve been trained to think of it in that way: as the end of the world and the Last Judgment. Yet, when we consider it more carefully, we realize that the Day of Yahweh has little or nothing to do with the end of the world. What the end of the world will look like—if there is one—is of little or no concern to us. As T. S. Elliot once wrote, “This is the way the world will end, not with a bang but a whimper.” Rather than the end of the physical world, we can think of the Day of Yahweh yet to come as taking a leap out of time, where past, present, and future are but meaningless ideas. On the Day of Yahweh, each of us—the people we really are inside—will leave this physical world behind, just as Jesus did. We’ll graduate from this earthly school of love and rise to a state of being where Love and those we’ve loved are all that exists.
Consider Jesus’s words that John reported to us in his gospel, where the Lord tells his disciples about Yahweh’s will for all of us. “For this is the will of my Father,” he says, “that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life and I shall raise him on the last day,” that is, on the Day of Yahweh. There we see clearly the three dimensions of that Day: the death and resurrection of Christ in the past continuing in the present as we’re challenged to trust that, just as the Spirit raised Jesus from the dead, he will do the same for us who believe. Then, into the future, when we will face our personal “last day,” the Day of Yahweh coming for you and for me.
This should be the source of our consolation as we remember in our hearts and souls those we’ve loved as we celebrate this eucharist in their memory. They’re not gone; they’re with us still. Pay attention to the words of the preface we’ll be reciting in just a few moments, “Lord, for your faithful people life is changed not ended.” The Day of Yahweh is the fulfillment of a promise God made to us, his people, long ago. The Day of Yahweh marks for us the end of futility and fear. The Day of Yahweh makes all things new. My friends, this is the Day of Yahweh. Indeed, this is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
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