GOD IS NOT MOCKED

Homily for November 27^th, 2013. Daniel 5:1-6,13-14,16-17, 23-28.

          It was quite a party. The Babylonian King Belshazzar knew how to do these things right. He brought in all the women from his harem, to be admired by his guests. There were singers and dancers. The wine flowed like water. When everyone in the hall had drunk deeply, he ordered the silver and gold vessels which his father, King Nebuchadnezzar, had plundered from the Jewish Temple at Jerusalem to be brought in, so that they could drink from them to all their pagan gods.

          Then it happened: a scene out of a Hollywood blockbuster. High up on the wall, brightly illuminated by a nearby lamp, a hand started to write three mysterious words on the wall: MENE, TEKEL, and PERES. Suddenly the great hall was silent, the king and all his guests aghast. “Call Daniel,” the king ordered in a trembling voice. Daniel was the bright-eyed Jewish teenager who, we heard two days ago, refused to eat the food sent to him from the king’s table, because it was not kosher. “If you can tell me what those words mean,” the king told Daniel, “I’ll give you the highest honors in my kingdom,” Belshazzar said. “You can keep your gifts, sir, Daniel replied. “I’ll tell you what the words mean.”

          And he did. To this all powerful man, a ruler not limited by any laws or constitution, Daniel said: “You’re finished. Not once in your life did you ever worship the only true God. You’re washed up – and your kingdom too. The God of Israel has sent this hand to tell you that you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.”

          This whole story from the book of Daniel is not history. It is fable – like the fable about the 6-year-old boy George Washington cutting his father’s new cherry tree with the axe which some stupid fool had given him – and then confessing to his father that he couldn’t tell a lie. He had killed the tree. The fables in Daniel were written to encourage the Jews, exiled and maltreated in Babylon, to remain true to their God and faith. Despite suffering and persecution, the author was telling them: ‘The Lord will protect you. God is not mocked.’

 He is saying the same to us today.