Time for Wavering

Time for Wavering

Jude 1:17-25

And have mercy on some who are wavering. Jude 1:22

I’ll be honest: being assigned this passage felt a bit like sitting next to someone on an airplane who, after a few minutes of pleasant chitchat, mentions sotto voce that we are clearly living in the end-times. “Oh no,” one thinks. “This is going to be a long flight.” 

At only 24 verses, the book of Jude at least spares us a lengthy voyage; it’s more of a puddle-jump. Nevertheless, the author is eager to let the reader know that the end is nigh. Having just quoted the apocalyptic text of I Enoch (v. 14-15), the author drives the point home: “In the last times there will be scoffers who follow their own desires.”

Yes, well, I suspect he’s right. I imagine, too, that in the last days there will be people who misplace important items and are cranky when they don’t get enough sleep. While these might not be our favorite behaviors, they are reliably human ones.

But as this short flight begins its initial descent, there is a moment of gentleness from our apocalyptic seatmate: “have mercy on those who are wavering,” he says. It’s that verse which sticks with me as I gather my metaphorical luggage from the metaphorical overhead bin. For the apocalypse didn’t, as it turns out, show up shortly after the author of Jude wrote this letter.

The congregation which so worried him because of its inclusion of interlopers, transgressors, selfish people, grumblers, and the like: they ended up having a while to work things out. So that mercy he called for was, in retrospect, a decent investment. Perhaps we would do well to remember that in our own moments of apocalyptic moral urgency. 

Dr. Sarah Morice Brubaker

Associate Professor of Christian Systematic Theology

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