It May Be

What do you do with an offer that says it may be? Zephaniah makes one, and the last clause of it is the whole difficulty: it may be ye shall be hid in the day of the LORD's anger. Everything in front of that clause is an imperative and is certain. The clause itself is a maybe.

Look at who is being told this, because it is not the crowd you would expect. Seek ye the LORD, all ye meek of the earth, which have wrought his judgment. The meek, and they have already worked his justice. These are the compliant, the ones with a record behind them, and what they are told to do is seek righteousness, seek meekness, as though neither had been secured by the doing of it. Then they are the ones handed the maybe. Nobody in the sentence is offered a better rate for good behaviour.

Behind it stands a chapter that explains the hurry. Zephaniah has spent it on a day of wrath, on darkness and gloominess, on trumpets against the high towers, and on the discovery that silver and gold will buy nothing at all that day. Money is the thing that has always worked, and it is named and ruled out. Then this, put to the people least likely to need the warning, with no guarantee attached. The verse is not improved by turning it may be into certainly; the prophet had that word and declined it. So do one of the two things he names, this week, where it will cost you and settle nothing: the apology that will not repair the friendship, the honest figure on a form nobody was going to check. His readers were offered these terms and no better ones.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 322 is God Meant It for Good (Genesis 50:20).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two