!!INSTALL!! Download Behold He Comes Riding On The Cloud
Celina Ruffel
Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your kingcomes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
Zechariah 9:9 was therefore understood messianically. According to this Talmudic discussion, if we are worthy, the Messiah will come in the clouds. But if we are unworthy, he will come riding on a donkey. In other rabbinic conversations, some say the Messiah will come when all Israel repents and proves their worthiness; others, when all Israel observes one Sabbath together. Until that happens, we cannot expect the Messiah.
Now, to say that Yahweh rides on the clouds to bring judgment isalso to say that Yahweh rides on the clouds to bring salvation. For everyallusion to Yahweh riding on the clouds is also an allusion to the Exodusstory. Yahweh appeared in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to save,to protect, and to guide the children of Israel, but the glory cloud of Yahwehthat delivered Israel also damned Egypt.
Light, fluffy and elegant, the Speed Cloud is certainly a sightto behold. Zipping through the sky at breathtaking speeds,thrill-seeking angels are having the time of their lives whileriding in style. It comes as no surprise that this mount quicklybecame the talk of the town when it was released in the ItemMall.
We are awakened, then, in the Services of the first Sunday, by the warning voice of an Apostle, that "now it is high time to awake out of sleep;" that "the night is far spent, the day is at hand;" that we must therefore without delay, "cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light." Just so the Jewish Church was awakened by one crying in the wilderness, "Prepare ye the way of the LORD;" the message of John the Baptist was the same as the Apostles to us"Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." He was to "turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just;" he was to be the Elias who was "to restore all things;" and accordingly the prophecy in which his mission was foretold, after vehement rebukes and warnings to the Jewish people, concluded with a solemn exhortation to them to "remember the law of" GODS "servant Moses, which he commanded in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and the judgments." (Mal. iv.) In like manner St. Paul urges upon us the solemn Law which has been given to the Christian Church, the "new commandment," by which we shall be tried, when the messenger of the Covenant comes again to His Temple. The Apostle has been giving many precepts of Christian practice, (ch. xii, xiii.), but it seems as if he heard his Masters voice, "Behold, I come quickly," and so the more anxiously sounded in our ear the simple commandment which He left us, to "love one another." "He that loveth another hath fulfilled the LawLove is the fulfilling of the Law. And that, knowing the time; the day is at hand; let us therefore walk honestly as in the day, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the LORD JESUS CHRIST." And now, having seen and felt what CHRIST will seek for, when He comes into his temple, we may profit duly by the awful lesson which we learn in the Gospel. The Jews had long been looking impatiently for the promised Deliverer; (Mal. ii. 17. iii. 1.) and when they saw Him riding into Jerusalem, as the Prophet had foretold, they cried, saying, "Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the LORD; Hosanna in the highest!" Meanwhile, what were the thoughts of the "meek and lowly" King? His forerunner had been despised, the Law of Moses had not been "remembered," the hearts of the fathers were not turned to the children, nor the hearts of the children to the fathers;and He was now coming to "smite with a curse." (Matt. iv. 6.) And when he came near, He beheld the city and wept over it. He went into the temple and cast out the buyers and the sellers and the money-changers, as a type and signal of that still more fearful clearing of His Temple, when He laid Jerusalem even with the ground, and her children within her, and gave the privileges of His chosen to the Gentile world. Such fearful vengeance was taken of those who "refused Him that spake on earth;" how then "shall we escape if we turn away from Him that speaketh from heaven?"we, who have "received the kingdom which cannot be moved;" who are come not to Horeb, but unto Mount Sion, "unto the city of the living GOD, the heavenly Jerusalem." Surely it becomes us to listen to the affectionate warnings of the Church, as she awakens us from our slumber, and recounts our high duties and our inestimable privileges.
James McGregor is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Georgia. Last months media coverage of Pope John Paul IIs 25th anniversary took me back to the night of his election. I was in the crowd in St. Peters Square when he made his first appearance as pope. I had been in Rome for a month or so by then. I had seen the first John Paul who served as pope for only 28 days on two occasions. On the first, he stood beside the mayor of Rome at the base of the Capitoline Steps during the ceremonial possessio, when the pope takes possession of the Church of St. John Lateran. The second time was after Mass on a September Sunday, when he read a homily from his apartment window. He gave a very simple sermon, the kind you might hear from a small-town minister or rabbi. The sermon seemed very slight in the great square, not intimate but too small for the space. He died unexpectedly the next weekend. Once the conclave for the election of the new pope began, I went to St. Peters twice a day for what Italians call le fumate, or, in English, the smokes. Piety was not my motive. I am a medievalist by profession, and like most in the field I am a connoisseur of Catholic ritual, which forms a universal backdrop to medieval literature and culture. Unlike many medievalists, however, I am not a believer. I was doing research in the Vatican library, which is within the papal city itself, though remote from the Sistine Chapel, where the cardinals are immured while the conclave lasts. On my way to lunch, I would pause in the square one of the thousands of curious who gathered there. Shortly after noon a small stream of smoke would begin to appear from the spindly tin chimney of what I supposed was a wood stove somewhere inside the chapel. The smoke always began as a white wisp white smoke signals that a pope has been elected but as the fire grew an unmistakable cloud of black would envelope and overtake it. Everyone would wander off knowing that nothing had been decided. A crowd equally big would return at five for the burning of the days second ballot. After several days of white smoke overwhelmed by black, an evening smoke which began like all the others built to a shining white cloud. We went home for dinner, knowing that nothing else would happen before nightfall. By 7 p.m. the crowd in St. Peters Square was very large, though in the semidarkness it was impossible to guess its size. Many people were listening to Vatican radio, which already had announced the results of the vote. Cardinal Wojtyla, Cardinal Wojtyla, people were murmuring, wondering who, exactly, that might be. It was clear to everyone in the crowd, of course, that Wojtyla was not an Italian name. Around eight oclock the great glass-paned doors that lead to the balcony above the porch of St. Peters swung open. A crowd of cardinals drifted outside and spread themselves along the balustrade overlooking the cascading steps of St. Peters and the crowd. A few of them waved self-consciously. One of the cardinals stepped to a microphone and pronounced very slowly in deference to the echoes that rolled his words like boulders around the square, Annuntio . . . vobis . . . gaudium . . . magnum . . . No medieval formula for presenting a new pope to the Roman people, these are the words of the Vulgate Bible spoken by the angels who announce Jesus birth to the shepherds abiding in the fields. The King James Bible says, For behold I bring you good tidings of great joy . . . The slow voice of the cardinal continued, Habemus . . . papam We have a pope. The crowd roared at the completion of this familiar formula; the cardinal paused to let the sound die away, then went on, qui sibi nomen imposuit (who has given himself the name) Joannem Paulum II. The new popes name, like that of his predecessor, honored the much beloved though controversial and sometimes radical John XXIII, and the brilliant theologian and tactician Paul VI. But who was the person who had taken upon himself this resonant name? No one in the crowd knew much about him except that for the first time since the Renaissance, this pope was not Italian. The cardinals elect the pope, but the people of Rome have always played a part in the process. With no formal power, their responsibility and right of acclaiming the new pope on their own behalf and on behalf of the secular world has always been assumed. In the Middle Ages, when a popes power rested in no small part on his popularity with the Romans, this acclamation had real force. Now, like the possessio and the Sunday homily, it is simply part of the papal routine. But on this night, for the first time in centuries, there was something at stake. Would the Roman crowd acclaim a foreign pope? In a symbolic sense which is crucial in a symbolic office much was riding on what the new pope would do in the next few minutes. His Holiness Karol Wojtyla was introduced. He began to speak. The crowd was attentive from the first word, because he was speaking Italian. He started in a familiar way by playing down his abilities and playing up the difficulties of what he started to call, your Italian language, but then he stopped himself midway through the phrase and changed it to our Italian language. The crowd roared with delight. He went on to say, and if I make mistakes, you will correct me. At that moment the Roman crowd, and the rest of us who were neither Roman nor Catholic, acclaimed him as earnestly and enthusiastically as we could. Here was a person who was ready to do his best, who was bold enough on the most turbulent night of his life to express himself in what was probably his fifth language, and who wasnt afraid to admit he would make mistakes, and humble enough to invite the crowd to correct them. In the midst of pure ceremony the personified impersonal, in Melvilles phrase here was an immediate, intimate revelation of a person with power, warmth, and grace. The next morning a Milan newspaper reprinted his speech with the grammatical mistakes highlighted by italics, but the paper clearly missed the point. Form at its best should always be the framework of action, the stage on which we play ourselves.
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