Ensign: What The Thunder Said

All ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye. Isaiah 18:3

AN ENSIGN ON THE MOUNTAINS 11 April 2014

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying …

All this week in my blog I've been quoting the opening sentences of each of the five sections of T. S. Eliot's poem “The Waste Land” or the first few lines if the opening sentence is really long. Which part five, titled the same as today's Ensign, is at thirty-eight lines. It's one of my favorite non-Biblical pieces, and at one time – and I still may, I've got time until Jesus comes for me or I die – I was planning to write a series based upon its structure.

I have both glorified, and will glorify again.

“Old friend, the one thing we do not have is time!” Why does that line from a Battlestar Galactica comic book I'd read in the late seventies come to mind as I type this I'd planned as a reflection on Palm Sunday in two days? My only recall of the term “Palm Sunday” itself until well into adulthood comes from a MAD magazine joke where the palms were the hands of summer camp counselors, coaches, etc. all waiting to be paid for their part in Junior's experience! But yes, time is short.

I have both glorified, and will glorify again.

When Jesus went into Jerusalem on the back of an ass – what's come to be called His “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem, accounted for in Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19, and John 12 – He'd already told the ones who followed Him (more than the twelve disciples, but we'll get into that another day) that He's going to Jerusalem and He's going to get killed AND He's going to rise again … but it's flying over their heads. I expect it does ours too.

I have both glorified, and will glorify again.

 

 

Yes, even those of us who have accepted this, Jesus' death for our sin, and claimed God's promise of eternal life by accepting Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord, still have this fly over our heads. We don't get it, it just is. And the time for us to accept that “it just is” is running out. One of the three times thunder appears in the New Testament is later in John 12, actually, when some people say after God speaks directly from heaven that they heard it thunder, or some heard an angel speak to Jesus.

 

 

 

I have both glorified, and will glorify again.

It's how Jesus responds to the many questioning looks around Him two verses after John 12:28 that I've been repeating here again that should catch us, heralding in (reading verse 30) “the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world [i.e. Satan] be cast out”. THAT'S when the clock started ticking, not with Jesus' death on the cross (the event described and prophesied again in verse 32, when Jesus “lifted up from the earth, will draw all unto me”.

Here's the triumphal entry,

David