The Message Remix (284 page)

INTRODUCTIONMALACHI

 

Most of life is not lived in crisis—which is a good thing. Not many of us would be able to sustain a life of perpetual pain or loss or ecstasy or challenge
.
But crisis has this to say for it: In time of crisis everything, absolutely everything, is important and significant.

Life itself is on the line. No word is casual, no action marginal.

And almost always, God and our relationship with God is on the front page.

But during the humdrum times, when things are, as we tend to say, “normal,” our interest in God is crowded to the margins of our lives and we become preoccupied with ourselves. “Religion” during such times is trivialized into asking “God-questions”—calling God into question or complaining about him, treating the worship of God as a mere hobby or diversion, managing our personal affairs (such as marriage) for our own convenience and disregarding what God has to say about them, going about our usual activities as if God were not involved in such dailiness.

The prophecy of Malachi is made to order for just such conditions. Malachi creates a crisis at a time when we are unaware of crisis. He wakes us up to the crisis of God during the times when the only thing we are concerned with is us. He keeps us on our toes, listening for God, waiting in anticipation for God, ready to respond to God, who is always coming to us.

Malachi gets in the last word of Holy Scripture in the Old Testament. The final sentences in his message to us evoke the gigantic figures of Moses and Elijah—Moses to keep us rooted in what God has done and said in the past, Elijah to keep us alert to what God will do in the days ahead. By leaving us in the company of mighty Moses and fiery Elijah, Malachi considerably reduces the danger of our trivializing matters of God and the soul.

 

 

From:
Malachi
means “my messenger” and may have been a pen name. He spoke before Nehemiah became governor of Judah, or when Nehemiah went on leave back to Persia, or possibly during both periods.

 

To:
The great things Haggai and Zechariah predicted hadn’t happened. God’s people were comfortable but not rich. A descendant of David hadn’t become king of a great new nation. In fact, the Jews had only a paltry Temple and a four-hundred-square-mile province under the thumb of a huge pagan empire. Tired of waiting, the Jews felt God had let them down, but things were “okay,” so nobody complained. They went through the motions of worship but cut corners. Some married into well-connected non-Jewish families. They were fine, really. Okay, not really.

 

Re:
About 460-430 B.C. The Greeks invented theater as we know it, and Greek theater reached its high point in this period. It wasn’t just entertainment, although the Greeks enjoyed a good show with plenty of gore. Drama was a religious event: Tragic plays were written for the festival of the god Dionysus each year, they were performed only once (everybody came), and they dealt with themes such as how humans relate to the divine or why humans are violent. Originally, a play consisted of one actor at a time conversing with a group called the chorus. The playwright Aeschylus had the radical idea of two characters dialoguing with each other. Sophocles added a third actor on stage.