Hear this, O elders, give ear, all inhabitants of the land!
Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your ancestors?
Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children,
and their children another generation.
Joel 1:2-3
The Prophet Joel’s cry at the beginning of his oracle draws attention to the uniqueness of his time. A series of locust plagues had overtaken the land. First came the cutting locusts, then the swarming locust, then the hopping locust, then the destroying locust. What was not eaten by one was finished off by the next. In short, lots of loss. Loss on a magnitude that seemed unprecedented. So the prophet advised the people to draw their children’s attention to it and wake up to how God might still be at work even in the face of all this loss.
Then later in the oracle Joel invites people to turn their eyes toward the future. He announces God’s promise of salvation and repair of the damage. “I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer and the cutter. . . . You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the Lord your God who has dealt wondrously with you. (2:25-26)” In short, this loss will not be the last word.
It occurs to me that this is where we human beings have often found ourselves. Even though Joel speaks of the devastation of this locust plague as if it is unprecedented, it wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last time that people would find themselves living in that liminal space between the wake of destruction and the anticipation of restoration; between the tragedy that has passed and the repair that is yet to come. There is despair that occupies much of that space but there is also hope that invites us to consider what lies beyond the rubble. If we are people of faith the source of this hope is found in trusting God to redeem the situation and usher us into that broad and open space where we gladly receive and feast on the fruit of his steadfast love.
In our day, fires that are consuming big patches of the Western states, the invisible yet powerful presence of the corona virus, and the disparities and polarities that are at work in our social interactions, have teamed up to cut huge swaths of destruction in our world. Like the cutting, swarming and destroying locusts in Joel’s world, they have done a pretty good job of consuming a good bit of what has sustained us. Yet as we sit in this liminal space of wondering when the rains will come, when an effective vaccine will be introduced or when bridges over our divisions might be constructed, there is still a prayer to pray. It is a prayer based on the hope that the destruction caused by this triumvirate of plagues will not be the last word. It is a prayer that both springs from hope and also builds hope in us. It is the prayer that asks God to show us how he is at work right now to redeem the effects of this destruction.
Yet here’s the thing. . . . This redemption isn’t merely about returning us to the place we occupied before the plague. Repaying the years that the locusts have eaten doesn’t mean that we will feel like we felt before the locusts did their damage. Nothing can change the truth that the locusts have eaten those years and the scars caused by their devastation will not go away. Like the nail marks on the wrists and ankles of the resurrected Christ give witness to the truth of the darkness from which we needed to be delivered, some memory of that from which we have been delivered will always remain. And it is to our benefit that this is so. For that memory is a source of gratitude and praise. It leads us to apprehend just how wide and high and broad and deep the love of God is. In the relief we know after being delivered from the fowler’s snare we sing a new song. It’s a song of redemption. It’s a song about how the sources of our despair did not have the last word. It’s a song of celebration of the truth that there is no plague that can separate us from the love of God.
David Rohrer
09/12/2020