“Oh, that won’t do!’ said Bilbo. ‘Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?’ ‘It will do well, if it ever comes to that,’ said Frodo. ‘Ah!’ said Sam. ‘And where will they live? That’s what I often wonder.”
The worst dyscatastrophe seems to be that day when our very God was killed, by us. There are reverberations of that event not just after, but before the event took place. "He was despised and rejected"; "He came to his own, but his own knew Him not" "Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified" "if my enemy despised me, I could bear it, but it is you, my companion, my close friend, with whom I walked"
But of course, that event was preceded by the Fall; and followed by Resurrection. There was eucatastrophe hidden in the Fall (o Happy Fault!) and eucatastrophe embedded at the very heart of the Crucifixion. Flannery O'Connor writes:
There is something in us as story-tellers, and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance of restoration. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but he has forgotten the cost of it. His sense of evil is deluded or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. He has forgotten the cost of truth in fiction.
I think this is true of us as humans, too, not just storytellers or readers. We skip past the dyscatastrophe straight to the happy ending. Or sometimes, we get stuck in the unhappy part and can't get to the happy reversal. Certainly, I do both.
Today's Old Testament reading is about King David's plotting falsity to a man whose downfall only, as far as the story goes, came in being a faithful soldier and husband. I am also reading Ronald Knox's Retreat for Laypeople and today's reading seems timely:
....it is perhaps a little daring, when the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity becomes incarnate on earth, to describe him as coming home. But it gets the point, the point which stands out so clearly if you try to read through the Old Testament. Once you get beneath the surface ...you can see, all down the centuries, an intensive work of preparation going on, for one particular event.
....he came home, and his own family did not welcome him. How terribly often one heard, during the war, of a soldier who came back from the wars to find that he was not wanted! The wife — God forgive us all, what horrible creatures we are! — had got tied up with another man, and the fireside, dreamed of among desert sands or Burmese swamps, had become a cold hearth in the meantime; just where the man ought to have been welcome, he was one too many. When we have exhausted our indignation over that familiar picture, let’s remind ourselves that this was, in effect, the experience of Incarnate God. His own people, his Bride, as the prophets loved to think of it, had no use for him, could make no room for him in its twisted habit of thought. “I was sought by those who found me not” — the prophets had always been foretelling it. The people our Lord came to redeem in the first instance, not all of them, but as a people, rejected him, and reject him still.
Put together with David's ploys and you see Jesus as being on the other side of that cruel bargaining-- the faithful husband who comes home to betrayal and in this case, calculated destruction. Jesus is like Uriah, not like David, here; he has made Himself the poor man with only one lamb.
How sad this is! My family has just finished watching Foyle's War which is set in WWII and its immediate aftermath, and the scenario Fr Knox refers to as a "familiar picture" is one that is evoked again and again in the series, with varied circumstances. Sometimes there is infidelity, sometimes there is the tension and difficulty in picking up a relationship in changed circumstances with changed people. There is always a cost, a revelation of truth, a difficulty of restoration.
This parable of the Husband is in reference to the Church, the People of God, the Bride through history, and of me individually. I am the one who is culpable -- of not counting the cost of truth, of underestimating the evangelium, the sheer gratuity of the outcome, the goodness in it, and what it asks of me.
That's where the ever-practical Sam's question comes in. Where will they live? What do we do next? For surely, the road goes ever on, the story still continues, and what I do matters more than I am always aware.
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