Cut off, and crowned

It is the first year of the Persians. Babylon has fallen overnight, the empire that burned the Temple and dragged Daniel’s whole world into exile. Daniel is now an old man, near ninety, and he is doing something quiet and almost ordinary: he is reading. He has come to the scroll of Jeremiah and counted the years – seventy of them – that the prophet said the exile would last. The number is nearly up.

So Daniel prays. Not a tidy prayer. He puts on sackcloth, sits in ashes, and confesses – and the striking thing is the pronoun he uses. He does not pray, ‘They sinned.’ He prays, ‘We have sinned and done wrong. We have acted wickedly and rebelled’ (9:5). The most righteous man in the book stands inside the guilt of his people and pleads not on the basis of anyone’s goodness: ‘For we are not presenting our petitions before You because of our righteous acts, but because of Your great compassion’ (9:18). Then comes the cry that empties of every bargain: ‘O Lord, listen! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, hear and act!’ (9:19).

While he is still speaking, the answer arrives. The angel Gabriel tells him the seventy years of exile are real – but behind them stands a longer reckoning, ‘seventy weeks,’ seventy sevens, decreed ‘to stop their transgression, to put an end to sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness’ (9:24). Daniel asked for a city to be rebuilt. He is handed the end of sin itself.

A woman I’ll call Ruth spent decades volunteering in a hospice. She told me once that the hardest patients were not the angry ones or the frightened ones. The hardest were the ones still building a case. Near the end of their lives they would catalog, out loud, the reasons they had been good: the church committees, the debts forgiven, the children raised. They were preparing to be assessed, marshaling evidence for a tribunal they could feel coming.

The ones who died at peace, she said, had stopped doing that. They had quit the defense. One man, days from the end, said to her simply, ‘I have nothing to show. I’m just going to throw myself on the mercy of the court.’

That is the posture Daniel takes in chapter 9, and it is the posture the whole vision is built to reward. He stops presenting his righteous acts. He has nothing to show but God’s compassion – and that turns out to be the one plea heaven was waiting for. The man with nothing in his hands is told about an Anointed One who would have nothing in His.

A Judean noble carried to Babylon as a youth and made to serve four pagan kings across the rise and fall of two empires. Faithful in a foreign court, he refused the king’s food, survived the lions’ den, and read the times by reading the Scriptures. In his old age, counting Jeremiah’s seventy years near their end, he confessed his people’s sin as his own and pleaded on God’s compassion rather than any righteousness of his own – and was answered with the vision of the Messiah cut off and the Son of Man crowned.