I Want to Be Ready

Malachi 3:1-4

With the first snow, or at least the threat of snow, came one of the annual winter rituals. In supermarkets all over the city, shoppers crowded lines and lanes stocking up, not necessarily because they believed the forecast but just in case. The meteorologist read the signs on the doppler radar and saw the signs of a snowstorm ahead. Why are you stocking up after hearing the reports? Not necessarily because I believe I will be snowed in; I want to be Ready. What I cannot understand is why we don’t stay ready. Winter comes around every year, and most years it brings snow.

The prophet Malachi, whose name means messenger acts as a kind of weather forecaster. His writings occurred during a time of restoration and rebuilding on one hand, and complacency and corruption on the other hand. The book of Malachi is designed as a series of statements followed by questions. It reads like a kind of argument between God and God's people in which the central question has to do with where divine justice and judgment are. This section of the book has come to be identified as a prophecy concerning the coming of the Messiah and is taken up in the New Testament as a word about the coming of John the Baptist.

One thing is clear in the text: Eventually God always comes to claim what belongs to God. It seems that the corruption of the temple and the corruption of the worship have gone unnoticed by God, but things are not always as they seem. The prophet declares that God is sending a messenger ahead of God and that eventually God will come back and occupy God's temple. If you're waiting for justice, you hear this news with anticipation.

The question is Will I be ready? The Lord is, after all, like a refiner's fire and a fuller’s soap. Both refining and fulling have as their goal the removed of impurity. To refine silver and gold the refiner heats the metals to exactly the right tipping point to allow the impurities to burn away or be taken out. To full wool, the fuller uses special soap and often agitates the cloth in an effort both to cleanse and to thicken and strengthen it. In our lives, the Lord is really both the refiner and the fire, both the fuller and the soap. None of these processes is necessarily pleasant, but everything God does in our lives is purposeful.
The Lord who enters the temple come with his own tools for making it fit.

In Advent, let us hear anew the messenger and pray for our preparedness.