Love and Fear

There were hundreds, thousands of birds. There were so many birds I was still seeing them after they were long past, moving specks entwined in the soft orange of the sun blending with the horizon. They were swallows, brown and not still and crowded in the air, but I thought they might be doves come to warn us of God's love.

All men tremble at God's wrath; how many weep and shake in the shadow of His love? How many see those gentle birds as harbingers of peace, rather than harpies from the throne of the Most High sent to terrify us into His presence? Why is love now all gentle smiles and kindness? What about the kindness of fire and whirlwind?

Where I live it's rare to see more than a moderate flock of birds at one time. Traffic on the freeway slowed in the midst of silent wings, each of us awed by the sheer number. Number itself is frightening to those who are singularities. We are one; in the face of multiplicity we tremble, afraid of being overwhelmed. This is partly why we fear God.

God is perfect singularity because He is also perfect multiplicity. We fear Christ because He is both God and man, a lion and the lamb, two natures in one person. When one thing reveals itself to be more than itself, our human propensity is to hide, to shut ourselves away from what is capable of overwhelming us. So it is with the peace and love of God.

The love of God that set the Son at the Father's right hand is the same love that will judge all men from the throne of justice. The peace that surpasses all understanding issues from the same source as the wrath that plagued Egypt tenfold. Moses strikes a rock and lives; he strikes another, and dies. For all that we can know about God from His Word, He remains a mystery, transcendent.

We embrace the softness of swallows, the hazed blur at the edges of wings as they flail in the sunset, clouds that have deigned to come near the earth. We listen to their high voices like the voices of careless angels, sharp and clear and sudden. We smile as they play, smile as they jerk their little heads back and forth, smile as Adam must have smiled naming them.

But when they swirl like an Israelite smoke column, cutting us off from the sky, hemming us to the dust from which God stirred us, then we wish them dispersed. Then their song becomes a banshee shriek, a siren of impending doom, the storm that is God's love. All the swallows but one flock, and we are afraid because the many are one.

It is good to fear God, as much because He is love as because He is all perfection and strength. How can we exult in the selfless love of Christ without hiding our faces from its ultimate expression on the stark and lonely cross? How can we love His creation without dreading its terrors? How can we love the little swallow and not shake when he becomes a host?