God's Silence

             On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days (John 11:17)

             Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. (Genesis 15:13)

             Then he continued, “Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them.  But the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, because I was detained there with the king of Persia. (Daniel 10:12-13)

             "Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place.

            “Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. He will confirm a covenant with many for one ‘seven.’ In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him. (Daniel 9:24-27)

 

 

            I have been in audiences that called themselves to order because the lectern watched them silently. The passages above are all about times of silence. Jesus wasn’t around for four days after Lazarus died. The Israelites would be slaves for 400 years in Egypt. Daniel prayed and didn’t get an answer for three weeks. And more than 400 years are described in Daniel as passing between Cyrus’s decree to rebuild Jerusalem and the coming of the Anointed One. Scripture is filled with silent times, and one of the big ones is the Saturday between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. It wasn’t only a sabbath in a holy week; for the disciples, it was a time of fear-filled suspense. Jesus was dead, and they would surely be next.

            They had been so sure. The Jews were waiting for a Messiah. The disciples thought they had found Him and went so far as to ask when He would set up His kingdom. They were saying, “Hurry up!” And Jesus said, “Not Yet.” Now He was dead. They’d been wrong, or they’d been fooled. No, Jesus had warned them, but what would they make of that? They’d failed Him… denied Him… forsaken Him, and now, they couldn’t even flee because running away was forbidden on the Sabbath. The last thing they wanted to do was run out onto an empty stage and act guilty.

            So instead, they hid and waited. When Job’s “friends” visited, they sat in silence for seven days and seven nights.  In their grief, the disciples may have done the same through the last third of Friday and all day Saturday. But I suspect that they shared memories and fears. How could they return to the area around Galilee and face all those people who would know they’d made a mistake.

            Jesus had specifically told Peter to strengthen the others. Did he? Did the disciples watch him, waiting to follow his lead? Did the disciple who was with him in the courtyard tell anyone else?  Did they pray? Or were they silent like the day?

            Silent times are hard, but we are called to practice the spiritual discipline of silence. It’s a time in which we face ourselves and face our weaknesses, failures, wounds, and disappointments.

            But there’s something else about times of silence. When Jesus reached Bethany, He raised Lazarus from the dead. The four hundred years in Egypt ended, God sent Moses to free the Jews from Egypt. When the twenty-one days were over, Daniel’s prayer was answered. When the four hundred years of silence at the end of the Old Testament were over, Jesus died on the cross. And the dawn after Silent Saturday ended, Jesus was alive again.

            We cannot say that something spectacular happens every time God is silent. We cannot even say God is silent because we don’t hear Him. We may simply not be hearing from Him what we want. But the point of God’s silence is to get our attention. And it seems that the bigger the announcement God wants to make, the longer the silence lasts. But perhaps, if we were more comfortable with silence, the times when God is silent might not be as long.