The righteous shall live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4)
Ordinary Sunday 27, 7th October, 2001
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
The name of the minor prophet Habakkuk is not one that provokes a response
of instant recognition among many Christians, apart from the obvious exoticism
of the name. Yet the very short collection of sayings that appears under his
name – three pages in the New English Bible or any similar modern version – has exercised an influence in Christian thinking out of all proportion
to its slim bulk. St Paul, in his letter to the Romans, was to quote from
Habakkuk as he teased out the issue of the basis of our relationship with God.
As he asserted the priority of what we might now well call attitudes and our
internal disposition over external expressions – (a contrast for which he
used the terms faith and works) – he quoted a single verse from Habakkuk:
'he shall gain life who is justified through faith'. In the context of Paul's
discussion, Habakkuk's words could open up a whole range of discussion not
foreseen (or intended) by their original author. When 16th century Christians
had different visions for reforming the church, St Paul's discussion concerning
faith and works, and this tiny line from this exotic sounding prophet, became
an important part of the polarised positions of Roman Catholics and Reformed,
matter to be quoted and its interpretation disputed over and over again. Modern
discussions between the inheritors of these divisions have seen substantial
agreement and an end to the arguments in which Habakkuk's seemingly innocent
line appeared.
However, my own first exposure to Habakkuk was not to this text as part of
Reformation history, or in the study of Pauline writing, but the year before
I matriculated. It was the time of the appearance of important new Biblical
translations, not only the New English Bible, which I found a little pedestrian
in places, but of the Jerusalem Bible. The Authorised Version of a handful of
passages from Old Testament prophets was already indelibly inscribed on my
consciousness through familiarity with Handel's Messiah – particularly,
though not exclusively, in excerpts sung by Kathleen Ferrier. That rich, warm
and direct voice made the prophetic texts, even in a venerable translation,
seem direct enough. But more than the New English Bible, the Jerusalem Bible
brought the minor prophets alive with a new directness and freshness. I read
whole minor prophets at one sitting. As I read the opening chapter of Habakkuk,
the new translation made it easy for me to envisage his subject matter –
the sudden appearance of a new and ruthless imperial power, the Chaldeans, who
would treat the Assyrians, the current but aging imperialists of the Middle
East, in just the way the Assyrians had behaved when they were a vigorous and
ruthless war machine.
The year that I devoured much of the Jerusalem Bible's version of the
prophets, and also read the Bhagavad Gita in Mascaro's wonderful translation
was also the year of the Seven Day War in the Middle East. At school, I had
close Jewish friends. One, Leo, had been born in the Balkan states but taken
as an infant to live on a kibbutz just under the Golan Heights. When our
motley team of Anglo-Celts, Greeks, Italians, English and Israelis changed
for soccer, you could see his back covered with shrapnel wounds from an
incident when he was playing as a child in this hotly contended zone. At
lunchtime, he would sit in the boys' part of the yard listening to the news
on a transistor radio; once he had wanted to be a doctor, an instrument of
healing. If the war was still being fought once his 18th birthday came (it was
not long) all he now wanted was to enrol in the Israeli air force. On our TV
screens, there was an image of tanks stranded in a desert. Somehow, even then,
I was forming an impression that the world in which many Biblical writers had
formed their responses to God – in a context of ominous background noises
or direct upheaval – was not completely remote from the present world in
whose events we were caught up.
In the end, when allowances have been made for some obvious differences,
Habakkuk, as well as some others of the minor prophets, can be read by us as
quite contemporary figures. And I would encourage you to go home and read this
short text (shorter than any short story, or any feature length article in the
weekend press) and find this in various ways. The opening of this morning's
reading indicates one of these. Here, and at various other points, he is quite
different from some other Old Testament texts. We might recall Micah, Amos or
Isaiah, in whose great passages humanity is called to question and subject to
scrutiny. But Habakkuk is like the figure of Job, or like most of us at times.
The initiative comes from him, impatient and discontented with the way things
are. 'How long, O Lord, have I cried to thee, unanswered? I cry "violence",
but thou dost not save. Why wilt thou let me see such misery, why countenance
wrongdoing'. This is well beyond the prayer of a cultic prophet bringing the
intercessions of the faithful. It is a personal level of disquiet that is
registered here.
Secondly, the initial answer from God is not a comfortable one, an
encouragement to hope or a promise that wrong will be righted. Instead, it
is the threat of more of the same, only worse: if things have been far from
reassuring under the Assyrians, then the ante is about to be upped. There will
be no obvious 'answer', no sudden intervention. Positively, Habakkuk envisages
that there is to be a resolution – but that this is not being offered in
terms of normal human understanding or time frames is made clear. A vision, a
word is to be written down, but not fulfilled at once; instead, it is as
though postponement and waiting are integral elements of the human experience
of God's purposes and of God Himself. It is in this whole context that Habakkuk
makes the statement that the righteous shall live by faith. Waiting for that
which is not yet, but which is of God, or is consistent with God, is the
quality which sustains the life of those who belong to Him.
I don't want to fall into a common preacher's trap of trying to identify
every passage of scripture, or a particular passage of scripture, as strikingly
relevant to our present circumstances. Habakkuk's significance is not reliant
on the fact that the present moment is one in which we might see some parallels
to Habakkuk's – one of apparently ominous waiting, of the threat of major
powers assembling forces, of outcry concerning injustices, real or perceived.
Habakkuk's significance lies rather in something far more than the particular
constituents of points in time such as ours, in parallels, superficial or deep.
As we come to the realisation that all kinds of experiences, positive as well
as the negative, disturbing or ominous, end with a sense, not of completeness,
but of dissatisfaction – the idea of God, even the fleeting
experience of God, recalls us to what could be, and the emptiness of what is.
In the light of that part of our experience, there is an increasingly
spiritual dimension in accepting that we are to wait, that much is 'not yet'.
The scroll on which the vision for the future is written is a finite symbol of
that fulfilment; but in the meantime, we continue to be called to the vocation
of those who wait, not in the sense of some kind of inactivity, but of a
positive acceptance of our current and ongoing limits – An acceptance
that, like other aspects of our life within God's kingdom, is demanding, and
needs as much, if not more, strength and determination in maintaining, than
does recourse to more superficial and active ways of filling the time.
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