In Your Dreams?

I'm generally concerned about dreams and their contents, and whether or not they are 'messages from Heaven'.  I believe that we have to be very careful before assigning divine significance to what we dream.  With that caveat, I’ll continue.  

A few weeks ago, I awoke with a particular sentence ringing clearly in my mind.  “It was Shadrach who, at the foot of the Cross, knelt and said, ‘Lord, I forgot ...’.”  It’s clearly biblical but not, so far as I can determine, from the Bible; I conclude that it was simply an almost coherent jumble of words that had passed through my mind in the previous few days.  However, on the assumption that it might be helpful to someone, I decided to examine each phrase of this sentence and see – wakefully, and with prayer – what conclusions I could draw from it.

Shadrach appears in chapter 1 of the book of Daniel, where we find him with two friends, Meshach and Abednego.  While Daniel is remembered under his original Hebrew name, his friends who, like him, were assigned Babylonian names by their conquerors, are more familiar as they were re-named.  Shadrach was originally called Hananiah, a name that means ‘Yahweh has been gracious’.  There seems to be no specific meaning to ‘Shadrach’, and it’s understood that these name-changes were likely to have been part of a simple expedient of replacing anything that gave expression to the former culture of the captives.

The idea of kneeling at the foot of the Cross is purely metaphorical.  It might have its origin in the thought that the Cross was on a hill (as in Mrs. Alexander’s hymn ‘There is a green hill’, although the Gospels refer simply to ‘a place called Golgotha’) in which case the eyes of an observer might well be at the (level of the) foot of the Cross.  Carrying further the metaphorical dimension, Jesus, as the King, is way above us in both moral and theological terms, and our rightful place might be said to be ‘at his feet’.

In the Gospels there is no mention of ‘the foot of the Cross’; the closest instance I could find is where Jesus commends his mother and the disciple whom He loved (whom we take to be John) to look after each other.  This passage begins, “Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother ...” (John 19:25 NIV, [my italics]).  However, I think the meaning of this expression is obvious, especially in those Christian traditions in whose jargon the believer is encouraged to ‘bring his sins to the foot of the Cross’, i.e. accept that Jesus’ sacrifice there has achieved forgiveness for their sins if these are confessed in repentance.

The general confession in the Book of Common Prayer includes the words, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done”, which take precedence there over the doing of “things which we ought not to have done”.  I don’t know about you, but I find it easier to call to mind what I’ve done than what I might have done if I’d remembered.  On that basis, it seems likely that I shall end my life with far more sins of omission un-forgiven than the other sort!

Putting these three thoughts together we might conclude that, whatever we might be called, through God’s grace, expressed by Jesus’ death on the Cross, we can be assured that, if we confess them sincerely, there is forgiveness both for our wrong actions and for allowing those good deeds to slip our minds.

Thinking caps on, then.  What have you forgotten lately?