Slip of the tongue while doing the reading the other week. Young Griswold managed to refer to the Lord returning to judge the "living dead." Which seems more appropriate given the general upset over the cliff-hanger ending to the latest series of the Walking Dead.
"Cliff-hanger" being an interesting term. You will, being educated folk, know that it goes back to the Thomas Hardy novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, where one or other of the dreary hero/protagonists - the smug, yet repressed journalist - is left hanging from a sheer cliff, staring at the blank eye of a fossilized shellfish. This being a Victorian serial novel, the readership were left to wait for the next episode to discover that Elfride has rescued her bold knight by making a rope out of her (numerous) undergarments.
Bringing these two concepts together, we realise that the last judgement - where will be judged the living, dead and - in an alternative universe - living dead, is the ultimate cliff hanger. We cling to the edge like a Hardyan hero caught in an offshore breeze. The sight of deaths before ours impresses itself on our eyes. We wonder - faced with our own death. Do we fall to the rocks below, having depended upon our own strength? Or are we saved by the One who is safe on the rock - is on fact the Rock itself?
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