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CHAPTER 18

 

The Ripe Fruit Needs Picking

 

“Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe.

Come, go down;

For the winepress is full,

The vats overflow—

For their wickedness is great.

 

"Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision!

For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision.

The sun and moon will grow dark,

And the stars will diminish their brightness.

 

"The Lord also will roar from Zion,

And utter His voice from Jerusalem;

The heavens and earth will shake;

But the Lord will be a shelter for His people,

And the strength of the children of Israel” – Joel 3:13-16.

 

 

It had long been a vulnerability in Hu’s martial outfit: the Jews.

 

It was for precisely this reason that he had just a hint of uncertainty, even of fear whenever the intoxication of spirit which was his norm, began to lessen slightly.

 

Unlike some in the Court at the time of the trial of his children as an accused party with Ralph, therefore, he had occasional moods, or if you think botanically, nodes, or if graphically, crests of foreboding.
This was an example.

 

As the stir began in the Court, the sense of the unknown – for God WAS quite unknown to Hu, nor did he seek His acquaintance - his mind flashed to the time, nor so very long before, when there had been, in military or confrontational terms, perhaps  the most devastating irruption of divine power the world had seen since the Exodus. His mind moved on this theme rapidly, as in the life coverage of those threatened by death. In seconds a vast recall came to him of recent political and military events, which the events transpiring now in the Court-Room thrust into his attention.

 

His mind had some time now to act, since the stir in the midst of the judges was ... vast! The thoughts of Hu became a little reverie, almost seizing him despite its quietness, inserting itself into his mind like a guard occupying a palace.

 

Yes, those Jews ... there had been there too a strangely dynamic episode, almost entirely, yes entirely unaccountably. What a deliverance they had been given!

  

Naturally, he thought with that grim realism which always tended to split his personality, in other respects hilariously pragmatic and interminably blind, at that time his daughter Margaret had pointed out one of her interminable facts. It was that just such a momentous thing was predicted in many biblical areas, not least Micah 7:15, where the comparison to the power of God displayed in the Jewish Exodus from Egypt was specifically made the template for the new deliverance to come. Divine power in this, she had told him, would operate momentously in this field, indelibly, incorrigibly, triumphantly.

 

This, she had told him, was that. This event was that forecasted. God had acted then, for the Jews' ancient Exodus from Egypt, and He had acted now, on the Jews' return after their prolonged dispersion and eventual restoration, not only to deliver them in marvellous military feats, but on that great new occasion, by an even more direct involvement. Hence the carnage of calamity, for the invaders. Israel had rejoiced, as well it might, on this recent parallel to the Exodus.

 

That dramatic dénouement of the recent past, it lingered in his mind as a powerful emetic in the body. It had certainly been an atrocity for one with plans, like Hu; and Margaret had not failed to point this out also: Man proposes, God disposes, she had declared. The lot is thrown into the lap, but the outcome is from the Lord, as Proverbs 16:33 defines it. She had not spared him, for Proverbs 21:1 still stuck rather unhappily in its unwilling home in his memory:

“The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water:
he turns it whithersoever he will.”

His mind flicked back a few pages of history just past, with that avid distaste which can come when the unpalatable is the confrontational, and needs attention.

 

There had been an overwhelming arrangement of northern states against Israel, and indeed many seemed to arise at its steps, and as these surged in, he had at least hoped that at the cost of whatever augmentation to Auschwitz, or holocaust to rival Belsen, there would at least be a quick ‘final solution’ for the Jews after all. The Arab oil, he found, was an indisputable world reality, and the world needed it, so it was no use playing about with high-flung ideals for Jews. Let them go to New York - Jew York as his morbid humour suggested - if they are able. This was his solution, though he never verbalised it. What God had promised no more concerned him than what he himself promised. The slick was his self-sentencing; but like oil, it made he thought, for smoothness.

 

That it also made for slippage, he did not consider; neither did he conceive the certain conquest of truth over guile. Reality is not so readily subdued.

 

The world body of that day, for its part, when the concurrent invasions came as one to face Israel, had smiled affably, declaring that the region must sort out its own problems, and no one  seemed to want to intervene. Was not the world Islamic body in this ? did it not for so long indicate that Israel’s return  to its homeland of ancient days was not a just restoration of a millennium of rule to the place where it had stood, but a catastrophe ?

 

Had not the United Nations in its day, been sometimes confusable with an Arab summit ? Was not the Islamic thrust wholly intolerant of Israel, and did it not desire to dominate the Middle East, not excluding its oil, and indeed much more also ? If not all Islamic people  were of this mind, assuredly there was a sufficient display on the religious notice board of horrific designs on the part of many, to make it a world phenomenon of the first magnitude. The New Religion sought to grant satisfaction to all who had entered it, and the past loomed large in its dealings.

 

Why intervene ? Hu had declaimed on that day, not so long ago, of the joint invasion of Israel. So the World Unity Force like its predecessor, the UN, had done nothing but wait. It reminded many of 1948, but the result was to be still more devastating for the pragmatic, urbane and cowardly prudence enshrined in the rapacious quiescence of the nations. Yes inaction can assuredly be rapacity!

 

It was indeed at that time that there had been two amazing developments. The first has been a vast religious phenomenon, with masses of Israelis turning back to their own Messiah, Jesus Christ. He had viewed this with nothing less than amazement, as indeed was the case with every action of God, since that time,  for to his own inflated mind it almost felt like an intrusion, even competition. Was not the Earth Unity Force the real god, or even …. God ? He played often with that concept.

 

The international invasion of Israel, not of course sanctioned precisely by the world peace body, as it used to be thought of at that time, but smiled on with nothing short of mild satisfaction, as the solution to oil and clangor problems in the Middle East, thus had become the disaster of that arena of time. Its repulse rested with the failures of history, the graphic marvels of contrariety to all reasonable expectation, Hu felt. Its drama did nothing to reduce its impact: Israel delivered again in ways so like those of Ezekiel 36’s prediction as you follow it through to 39.

 

That, like the fiasco of organic evolution, had been a difficulty, even for an increasingly totalitarian world. Never one to linger let alone loiter with mere facts,  Hu personally had been most active in seeking to find a propaganda ruse even to turn the Jewish deliverance to his own advantage, and of course, to that of the World Humanism and Mystery Propagation Unit, which was struggling at the time.

 

As to the physical realities, harder to overcome, the decaying corpses of the defeated invaders were interred over months. Ezekiel 39:11-12, Margaret had diligently brought to his attention, and his paternal admiration had sufficed to hear her out. It had been what the insurance companies had called an Act of God, before the Earth Unity Force had requested them to change the terminology: it was offensive to some, he had intoned.

 

That was part of a broader Act of God, as he himself still verbalised it, since that was the impact on his mind. He smiled even in retrospect at that, his own liberty above the rules for the masses. It was rather like Lenin's case, he thought, pragmatically giving the masses what they needed for control, without much sincerity on his part. Was he not the controller ?

 

In his active reverie, part shock, part bravado, which ran even while the meeting for the trial of his own children proceeded, there was a movement that fluttered in the august assemblage, like a bird caught in a cage. It was as if struck in the collective solar plexus, and sat stunned. It was like a drowning, but this was a social one; and as with some other such sudden challenges to the continuation of life itself, his mind worked with almost manic speed. He realised this shortly, since self-awareness was his forte.

 

Suddenly he realised that this was a psychological sedative that made him so dream, and he arrested its operation with an internal officiousness; but his mind used the occasion to pound like waves on his heart. The broader Act of God ? Was it not judgment and mercy ? Sometimes ruin for the inveterately ungodly, sometimes mercy for the helplessly lost seeking the Lord ? His mind becoming unruly, he sought to disengage, but instead it seemed to play as on a screen, vital images of the days when, under international assault, many in Israel, yes even in his own life-time, had turned to that same Jesus Christ whom Israel the State had judicially murdered, some two millenia before.

 

They had appeared in magazines, in the media, in colour, this time not a wall as the base of lament, but a Workman, the Divine Workman as some might call him … Him … Hu hesitated, his mind in revolt from his will. Families were re-united, some were like sculptures of the pitiful, their faces shining as if anointed with their own tears, eyes radiant, peace seeming to stream from their opened hearts, their spirits as if in some heavenly realm and gentle rain already, sobs shaking heavy frames and heartiness that was not contrived emerging in their midst, with such praises and exclamations that even Hu found it impossible to be untouched, unmoved ... much moved.

 

Were his heart not of black diamond, the industrial type, this would have shattered it! but Hu would not relent, though his own mind played advocate. His thoughts refused to disengage and poured on, like a rushing mountain stream, intent on proceeding. 

 

Yet this, he meditated,  it was far from all. There had been too a sense of mourning, of contrition, of shame which all the same became triumph, as if in returning to Christ they were sharing in His triumph, like children released from prison by the most compassionate of fathers, at supreme cost which in love he even delighted to pay. Then He came to rescue them outwardly, having first seized them inwardly, thought Hu. It was at that precise point that unilateral power was poured out that made pragmatic political plans seem childish.

 

It was all part of that broader scope, that divine scope ? He dithered as his mind insisted on reminding himself that all that was, just like the crucifixion and the resurrection, its date and its impact, the Gospel to come from it, precisely as predicted in Isaiah and the Psalms. Not for nothing had Margaret spent seemingly endless hours at his side over the formative years when pride made him accessible to her diligence, and paternity had yet to yield to ambition in his spirit.

 

His mind lurched, almost uncontrollable, like an aircraft seized by sudden yawing in a downward flight: and it was downward, for just as he momentarily looked up, as if a captive to his own mind, his will lurched to the base, not the basis, to the inveterate desire which wracked him, the collusion with ambition, the insistence on autonomy, what was at once the vain hope and the hope of vanity. He could not suppress it; and he would not. At least this much was the essential Hu.

 

 

That broader Act of God ? yes, he could still think of it like that, even if it was illegal, for thought intrusion into private minds, and the display of the same with verbalization, was not yet quite perfected and law had to be heavily intrusive in every possible way. Voicing thoughts was perilous for the plurality, but not for the minority, especially the minority of one, Hu himself. No one would know! he mused as he smiled wanly to himself. It was the unthinkable combination: first this massive conversion of so many of Israel to Jesus Christ, and that unbelievable episode of repentance, as Ralph had noted, as in Zechariah 12:10 and on. Worse had it been when Margaret came to reinforce the concept! How he longed for deliverance from his children and, for that matter, from the word of God!

 

It had all happened, the coming to the once despised cross of Christ, their enormity now their deliverance, the massive contrition in Israel and the military deliverance of the nation; and it left him in no doubt that he was being seriously challenged by God, whom now more and more Hu realised, was THERE TO ACT. The God who acts ... that was there, somewhere in Isaiah 64, and how Margaret had thrust that into his soul, as with a spiritual rapier. Remarkable girl!

 

It was the military outcome which struck him like a stinging blow to the eyes. That intervention was not Israeli, but … what could he say, divine! It was just like the Assyrian case when Hezekiah was delivered, and his army was left in ruins.

 

What was that historical King, centuries before Christ came ? Margaret had told him often enough … anyway, ah yes, Sennacherib, he was the fearless, the terrible, the despotic; and yet he had returned from his military program against Judah,  in tragic weakness, utterly humiliated and impoverished in power, his army a wreck, to be murdered while worshipping in his pagan temple while someone else sought to be king.

 

Hu shuddered at the thought, and rejected the natural logical turn of his mind to apply the analogy, for it came too close to home.  He felt like laundry, fluttering on the clothes line in a strong wind; but he would not repent, nor relent. Nor yet would his mind! Guilt came like some vast balloon in the upper air, in red, wafting in the skies of his thought. Let it! Even the redness was on dirty canvas, his inveterate attention to detail reminded him. Better dirt acknowledged and covered in sacrificial blood than left remaining, came a whisper of conscience ? of realism ? now more and more his mordant and almost inexorable foe.

 

THOSE things, both of them, the reckless seeming repentance of many in Israel, and  co-ordinate with it, the genuinely almighty act of … what he had to call God (God in competition maybe, perhaps hyphenate
it ? ... God-in-competition, yes decidedly), they had shaken his internationally corporate world. Yet things had moved on, and his financial plans to oversee and control all transactions had been international, a vast aid to surveillance, and it was just beginning to appear that all that could be put firmly in the past when … this!

 

This ? What WAS happening ? He surveyed the Courtroom, reluctantly brought back to the present.

 

Hu could scarcely believe his eyes. A seraphic smile seemed to descend on the lit-up faces of his own children, on whom he had unconsciously been focussing. HOW could they be so happy ? Death was just about to leap at them like liberated tigers, and they could smile ? What ?

 

Guards! he roared hoarsely. They are escaping …