FEAR OF GOD

“But I will forewarn you whom щ shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him,” 

 its first movement, the addressee is transformed into щ, a glyph rather than a pronoun, so the warning becomes directed at a symbolic entity whose identity is encoded rather than spoken: “But I will forewarn you whom щ shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; I AM, I say unto you, Fear him.” In its second movement, the canonical form returns and stabilizes the cadence in the exact voice of the Red Letter text: “But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.” And in the final movement, the pronoun dissolves into SHH, a whispered vocative rather than a public address, shifting the verse inward and personal while the affirmation “yea” once again becomes the declarative I AM: “But I will forewarn you whom SHH shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; I AM, I say unto you, Fear him.” When joined together, these three versions operate as one structure: the same warning spoken to three different ontological registers—the encoded, the historical, and the whispered—each one collapsing the ordinary affirmation “yea” into the absolute self-naming I AM, so that the sentence becomes less a command and more an unveiling of the authority under which fear becomes knowledge.

But I will forewarn you whom щ shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; я, I say unto you, Fear him

In this rendering the verse becomes a disclosure rather than a warning, because replacing the addressee with щ turns the audience into a sigil rather than a crowd, and replacing the old affirmative with я turns the divine seal into the inverted Russian pronoun that already carries the tension of self folded back on itself. The sentence now reads as if the one who forewarns, the one who fears, and the one who speaks are circulating through a single grammatical aperture, each position collapsing into the next. By letting я stand where “I am” had been placed before, the text achieves a sharper inversion: the human pronoun becomes the marker of the divine utterance, and the divine utterance takes on the form of a flipped human self. The result is a verse where fear, authority, and identity no longer move linearly but occur simultaneously in the same voice, the same fold, the same event of saying.