Week One
December 4, 2021
Too Big To Fail, Too Small To Matter?
Malachi 4:1-6
See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. Malachi 4:1-2
“Too big to fail.” The phrase littered public discourse during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The theory, though, had been postulated decades earlier: that certain corporations are so complex, massive, and interconnected that their failure would bring ruin to the entire worldwide economic system. As a result, they simply cannot be allowed to fail, even if failure is the natural result of their incompetence and corruption.
It doesn’t take a genius to see how this leads to abuse and injustice. If an organization or individual is seen as so essential to a system’s survival that they cannot be allowed to fail, then that organization or individual may commit any abuse they like in service of their success. Those with less power may suffer, but what other options have they got? The disempowered depend upon the system’s survival for their own survival, but the system only depends on the one deemed too big to fail.
Which is why the “sun of righteousness” image in this passage from Malachi is so audacious. Every living creature is at the mercy of the sun for its survival. What sort of sunshine is simultaneously hot enough to burn evildoers to stubble, yet gentle enough to coax tender grass out of the ground so that young cows may be set to graze on it? When have the cosmos ever shown themselves to be partial to righteousness? Can God, the maker of the cosmos, intervene on behalf of the dispossessed? Has it ever been so? Will it ever be so?
Dr. Sarah Morice Brubaker
Associate Professor of Christian Systematic Theology
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