In a hard-hat and closed-toed shoes, I walk into the blackened building. Water drips off the half-suspended ceiling tiles. Above the stairs, the roof gapes open. A turkey vulture sits in the bare tree branch. I step into what was yesterday a hallway, now crowded with splintered beams, pieces of metal framing, shriveled, illegible signage, the floor thick with ash. Everything is wet. Later I would find that what wasn’t burned by fire, or drowned by saving waters, would bear the permanent smell of smoke. 

King Nebuchadnezzar’s rage for power shows up in fire. It is the vastness of his capacity for narrow-minded injustice that stands out here. The story evokes the experience of Jewish exiles in Babylon and is also a cryptic tale of the brutal repression of the later Seleucid empire. This story of the pious refusal of three Jews—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego— celebrates resistance to the totalizing agendas of any empire. Nebuchadnezzar would have them bow to worship his massive statue. When these Jews refuse, he throws them to the fire. 

The fire is already stoked. The King prepared it in advance, a threat to any resistance to his program of uniformity. He is a tyrant, after all. But the three men refuse. And they do not plan to be saved: 

If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up. (Daniel 3:17–18, NRSV)

Notice that their faith is not that God will save. Their faith is that God is God, and Nebuchadnezzar, who is not God, will kill them. Is it their refusal to obey that so enrages the king? Or is it their refusal to fear? His anger rampages like the seven-fold heat of the oven he stokes. 

The story takes a haunting turn when suddenly we are made to see with the tyrant’s eyes: “I see four men, unbound.” What do we see when we—little tyrants—look on the works of our own destruction? May our own anger be thwarted; may our enemies be saved from us; may we be turned in that moment toward truth, toward justice; may we utter, like the king, a profession of wonder: “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego!” 

As for the three men, what does it feel like when the flames overtake the guards who brought them in? Lick at their bodies and coats? Burn through the cords that had them bound? Suddenly they find they are free, and in that hour of orange heat, they walk in perfect peace; they are not alone. In the fire of the tyrant’s stupid rage, they are not even singed. They do not smell of smoke.