There seems to be much talk today in the way of “vigilance, sobriety, alertness.” On every side sounds some call towards activism. We are come to the breaking of the epoch, it seems, and all around are horns sounding, calling us to action. Activism —of some ill-defined, generic and weary kind— has become our corporate steady-state. Uncountable for me are the number of recent sermons, essays, forms of punditry, videos, media posts of various kinds, etc. which begin along the lines of “it is important for us, in this moment to make sure we…” followed by some call to action. 1 Peter 5:8-9 seems to be the rallying cry for the hour: “Be sober; be on the alert. Your adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Resist him…”
For all our vigilance, however, I worry it is for nothing if we fail in being merry. For all our sobriety, for all our vigilance, for all our “getting real about the hard facts of life”, I fear we tempt even deeper kinds of drunkenness (of the damn-it-all-to-hell-I-cant-take-it-anymore-Im-so-tired-whats-it-all-for-anyways sort) unless we learn our sobriety from the doughty Galilean who turned 160 gallons of water into wine for a small rural village wedding when they had run-out. The merry Jesus of John 2 must define what we mean when we talk about sobriety and vigilance or else everything under that heading will tend towards baking bricks in Egypt and resenting the younger brother who has come at last to the end of his prodigality.
It is always under the guise of “being vigilant” that a joyless disheartenment creeps-in to subvert the very vigilance we thought would succor. There is no lack of tragic irony here: merriment will always seem like folly and drunkenness to those who want to “get real” about the hard facts of life. One can think of the report that the spies bring to the people of Israel at Kadesh in the desert of Paran, as one such example.
I remember the story in vivid colors from my childhood Sunday school class flannelgraph set: The spies, sent from Moses to reconnoiter the land, have had a merry adventure: “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit.” (Num. 13:27). That ethos of rollicking bivouacking espionage is not maintained, however. Almost all the spies realize it is time to sober-up and “get real” about the facts. And that’s a part of the problem.
Notice the disheartened spies say nothing false. All their information is, as a matter of military intelligence, the hard truth: there are giants (Num. 13:33), the children of Anak, sons of the Nephilim; the cities are large and fortified, the Jebusites and Amorites do live in the hill country, and the descendants of Amalek do dwell in the Negev (Num. 13:28-29); the land does in fact devour those who live in it (Num. 13:32).[i] To any accusation of cowardice or sedition they might rightly protest, “We’re just stating the facts. It’s our job to be watchful and vigilant, and we’re just giving a full report.”
There is a similar grimness to the assessment Denethor gives of Gondor’s situation after his son Faramir returns from combat on the brink of death:
“There is no news of the Rohirrim [...] Rohan will not come now. Or if they come, it will not avail us. The new host that we had tidings of has come first, from over the river by way of Andros, it is said. They are strong: battalions of Orcs of the Eye, and countless companies of men of a new sort that we have not met before. Not tall, but broad and grim, bearded like dwarves wielding great axes. Out of some savage land in the wide East they come, we deem. They hold the northward road; and many have passed on into Anorien. The Rohirrim cannot come.”[ii]
Like the disheartened spies, Denethor is also, on one level, just rehearsing the facts as he has gathered them from his vigilant surveillance of Mordor by way of the seeing stone. To him all of Gandalf’s hopefulness seems like folly:
“For thy hope is but ignorance. Go then and labour [sic] in healing! Go forth and fight! Vanity. For a little space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that now arises there is no victory.”[iii]
So also, in the camp of Israel, what Caleb says seems like anything but clear-eyed sobriety to the other spies: “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it” (v.30).
Were we there we might, along with the others, shake our heads sadly at the boyish overconfidence and rebuke him in the elevated diction of Denethor: “Fool art thou, Caleb son of Jephunneh; feed us not with thy haughty swagger.” And then, turning slowly, hang our heads as we set our faces to the long trek of four decades’ dying.
What did Caleb have that the others didn’t? Bravery, sure, but more than bravery and obedience, I think. “Guys we have to go, God said so” would be obedient enough. Caleb’s response is not merely obedient or brave in a kind of austere and grim way. It’s qualitatively other. Something more than dutiful resolution charges and inflames his speech. It is that his courageous obedience is tongued with the fire of merriment. You can almost hear within the valiance of his speech, some rumor of deep laughter.
Caleb’s report does not differ from the spies because he thinks the things the other spies are saying are factually inaccurate; he affirms the truth of their account. He differs in terms of how he thinks Israel should respond to those truths. Their account is not wrong per se, it is not the full picture. Israel has just passed through the waters on dry land, the horse and the rider have been hurled into the sea, water has sprung from a rock, meat and bread fill their camp each day, above them and before them burns the Fire Cloud of Yahweh. Caleb differs because he things that any account which does not include these things is wrong. Israel’s fear and despair have blinded them to the full and gladdening picture of what is really Real.
It's not that Caleb denies the existence of giants, it’s that he believes he can slay them.
At the heart of Caleb’s account of the real is the Terrible Joy of Sinai, the trembling trumpet-filled myriad of angels, the tambourine of Miriam sounding over the flotsam of up-turned chariots. If being sober and watchful means, on the one hand, not being drunk on too much wine, it also means avoiding another kind of drunkenness: the drunkenness of despair, of cold worrisome calculation, and of deadly incredulity about God’s faithfulness and goodness. Any vigilance that does not have at its core the unfathomable mirth of the God who “himself is festival”[iv] will tend towards joyless burn-out, exhaustive failure, and entropic collapse.
A joyless vigilance cannot be long maintained.
There is an illusion to believing that you see through the surficial happiness of the world, reading all joy as empty, into what you imagine is the real bitter heart of the world. But this mode of cunning and calculation, insofar as they often treat the world and people and spiritual forces and dominions and systems and God Himself as closed and dead, actually blinds us to the possibilities posed by a living world ruled by the Living God. For the Living God cannot only do new and unexpected things, the Living God can also raise the things that are dead.
If ours is a time marked by increasing calls to vigilance and sobriety, it is also a time marked by an overwhelming sense of joylessness. It is good for us to hear the apostle’s injunction to be vigilant and sober but if that vigilance and sobriety are going to be anything other than a spiced foaming cup of hopelessness, we must be careful to cultivate and guard that deep and unquenchable merriment which lies at the heart of the world.
For all their similarities, Gandalf and Denethor differ precisely on this point, as Pipin recognizes in the darkest hours of the War of the Rings:
“Yet in the wizard’s face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.”[v]
Notes:
[i] cf. Gen 14:10, 19:24-25 as examples of the land devouring, under the Lord’s hand, the inhabitants. It is important to note that Yahweh himself actually makes this fact explicit in places such as Deuteronomy 28. The condition for being devoured or vomited-out by the land is in fact related to the conduct of the inhabitants. The despairing spies seem to be immanentizing future judgements, anticipating their future failure to remain faithful while enacting it ‘now’.
[ii] J.R.R. Tolkien, Return of the King, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1966), 803.
[iii] Ibid., 835.
[iv] I got this phrase from Peter Leithart, The Ten Commandments: A Guide to the Perfect Law of Liberty, (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020), p.55, he cites Ramon Lull, De Proverbiis moralibus, tertia pars caput VIII- caput XVII, tome II, in Opera omnia (Mainz, 1721; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1965), as quoted in Pual Kuntz, The Ten Commandments in History: Mosaic Paradigms for a Well-Ordered Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), p.53.
[v] Tolkien, Return, 742.