Pensees: Ides of March

Ides of March

When most of us hear the expression for this 15th day of the 3rd month, we think of a foreboding sense of doom. It was, after all, the day that Julius Caesar was assassinated in A.D. 44. The story is that Julius Caesar had been forewarned by a soothsayer that something terrible was going to happen to him on the Ides of March. The Ides is actually just a name for the 15th day of March. The word “Ides” had no dark mystique to Caesar or his compatriots. As we name the days of our week, they named the days of their months. Therefore, Julius Caesar blew off the ominous warning, and continued business as normal.

The story that has been circulating for almost two millennia is that on that fateful day as Caesar walked to the Senate, he saw the soothsayer and laughingly told him, “See. The day is almost over and nothing has happened to me.” To which the prophet of doom responded, “Yes, but the day is not yet completed.”

The rest of the story is history. Caesar was brutally (corny pun intended) assassinated on in the Senate that very day.

Soothsaying, fortune-telling, and astrological star-gazing for insight into the future is an abomination. Believers know that. So what can we learn from Caesar when we think on the Ides of March? Clearly, the lesson we should learn from Julius Caesar is not that one should pay attention to the soothsayer or take any stock in subjective feelings of apprehension. Our Lord has told us that we are to “take no thought for the morrow” (Matthew 6:34). In other words, don’t worry. Fear and worrisome premonitions should be banished from our souls by faith in the Ever-Present Lord.

But there is a lesson. The lesson we must learn is that “thou knowest not what a day may bring forth” (Proverbs 27:1). Therefore, says the Holy Spirit, “boast not thyself of tomorrow.” Our lives can change or terminate in an instant. We simply have no idea what the future holds. We could laugh it off like Caesar, burying our head in the sand and denying the reality of our finite humanity or we could cower in anxiety, constantly looking over our shoulders and fearfully anticipating the worst at every turn.

Neither of those options appeals to me. I’d rather trust in a Sovereign Lord that ordains everything to work for my good which is ultimately conformity to the Son of God. I’d rather remember the words of a humble Apostle who lived in the same era as the arrogant Julius Caesar:

Go to know, ye that say, Today or tomorrow we shall go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil. Therefore, to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, it is evil (James 4:13-17).

It would seem that the context of the last statement suggests that the believer who knows he ought to live his life in humble recognition of a Sovereign Will but functions and plans as if that Sovereign Will is irrelevant is doing evil. We know, after all, what is true. We also know how our living should conform to that truth. We know our life is but a vapor and that our Sovereign Father could radically change our schedule at any given moment to conform to His perfect plan. We know it, but instead of doing good by living according to that truth, we live as if our lives our in our own hands to plan and do as we wish. To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not it is sin.

That’s what I’m thinking about this Ides of March.