The Prophetic Critique:

 

From the least to the greatest of them,

everyone is greedy for unjust gain;

and from prophet to priest,

everyone deals falsely.

They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,

saying, "Peace, peace,"

when there is no peace. Jeremiah 6:13-14

 

Casual readers of the Bible whose acquaintance with the canon of the Prophets is based upon sermons that illustrate visions of God's future wrath with selections from the Prophets form misconceptions about the content of these books. Very little of the prophetic oracles are about God's future actions. Most of the oracles are about the injustices of regimes contemporary to the prophet as signs of infidelity to God and the prophetic call to return to fidelity to God. Visions of God's wrath underscore God's anger with present iniquities. Wrath is a sign of God's pathos. The standard for justice to which the prophets most frequently appeal is found in Deuteronomy 10:17-19:

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

 

 

The prophetic voice is a critique of what is and a vision of what ought to be.

 

The following is based on Abraham J. Heschel, "History" in The Prophets Vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) pp. 159-186, and Perry Yoder, "The Prophets, The State, and Shalom" in Shalom: The Bible's Word for Salvation, Justice, and Peace (Newton: Faith and Life Press, 1987) pp. 102-119.

 

"The command of the palace, like the command of Anu, cannot be altered. The King's word is right; his utterance, like that of a god, cannot be changed." Mesopotamian saying

 

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton

 

"The prophets repudiate the work and power of human beings as objects of supreme adoration" (Heschel p. 159). They denounce and distrust human power. The root of all evil is our false sense of sovereignty. There is no limit to cruelty when we begin to think that we are masters.

 

Isaiah 10:12-19 and 14:13-15 ridicule the boasting of Assyria and Babylon. The claim to sovereignty and is countered with the fact that all human power eventually wastes away.

All human empires eventually decline and become the dominated or enslaved.

 

God's goal is to dishonor the honored, to humble the proud. Is 23:9 "The lord of hosts has planned it -- to defile the pride of al glory, to shame all the honored of the earth."

 

Is 2:9-22 describes our useless reliance upon the objects of our own creation.

 

The suffering servant psalms of Second Isaiah (see Is 42:1-4) provide an alternate version of God's agency.

 

 

 

"Material force is the ultima ratio of political society everywhere. Arms alone can keep the peace." John Henry Cardinal Newman

 

Isaiah 36 tells the story of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in which the Assyrian General, Rabshakeh, invites the people of Judah to surrender to his arms:

 

"Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria! Thus says the king: 'Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you. Do not let Hezekiah make you rely on the Lord by saying, the Lord will surely deliver us; this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.' Do not listen to Hezekiah; for thus says the king of Assyria, 'Make your peace with me and come out to me; then everyone of you will eat from your own vine and your own fig tree and drink water from your own cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards. Do not let Hezekiah mislead you by saying, The Lord will save us. Has any of the gods of the nations saved their land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Were are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who among all the gods of these countries have saved their countries out of my hands, that the Lord should save Jerusalem out of my hand." Isaiah 36:113-20

 

"When the prophets appeared, they proclaimed that might is not supreme, that the sword is an abomination, that violence is obscene. the sword, they said, shall be destroyed. [see Isaiah 2:4]

The prophets, questioning human infatuation with might, insisted not only on the immorality but also on the futility and absurdity of war" (Heschel p. 160). They present an alternative vision and deny that we can prevail by force.

 

Micah 2 describes the evils of military might.

Hosea 1:7 contrasts the way that human beings save with how God saves.

Hosea 8:14; 10;13; 8:9-10; 5:13 condemns "militarism as idolatrous" (Heschel p. 166).

 

Isaiah 2:4 describes how we will beat our swords into ploughshares when we acknowledge God's sovereignty (cf. Hosea 2:16-20)

Joel 3:10 mocks human attempts to defeat God by beating our ploughshares into swords

 

 

"The gods are on the side of the stronger." Tacitus

 

"The prophets proclaimed that the heart of God is on the side of the weaker. God's special concern is not for the mighty and the successful, but for the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor, for the widows and the orphan" (Heschel p. 167).

 

Jer 30:17 "For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal, says the Lord, because they have called you an outcast: "It is Zion; no one cares for her!"

 

Is 14:32 "The Lord has founded Zion, and the needy among his people will find refuge in her."

Is 29:19 "The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the neediest people shall exult in the Holy One of Israel"

 

The Messiah: God's anointed one

 

"Had the prophets relied on human resources for justice and righteousness, on man's ability to fulfill all of God's demands, on man's power to achieve redemption, they would not have insisted upon the promise of messianic redemption, for messianism implies that any course of living, even the supreme efforts of man by himself, must fail in redeeming the world. In other words, human history is not sufficient unto itself. Man's conscience is timid, while the world is ablaze with agony. His perception of justice is shallow, often defective, and his judgment liable to deception" (Heschel p. 184).

 

The messianic promises of the prophets provide a standard to which human rulers should aspire but with which human rulers should never confuse themselves.

 

Isaiah 2:2-4

Isaiah 11;1-9

Isaiah 16:3-5

Jeremiah 23:5-6

Zechariah 9:9-10

As Jeremiah 6:13-14 and Ezekiel 13 make clear, the powers of this world tend to cloak themselves in the guise of religious truth. St. Paul echoes the prophetic tradition when he consoles the Thessalonian community who suffers from persecution by the state with the words, "When they [their persecutors] say 'There is peace and security," then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape" (1 Thess 5:3). As Perry Yoder states, "Religion has often been a conservative force supporting the well-to do, the haves, at the expense of the weak and have-nots. Shalom makers must oppose this perversion of biblical religion." (p. 109) The prophets challenge us to recognize "white washed walls" that obscure the sorts of injustice that stand in tension with God's vision of Shalom, one characterized by shared prosperity and justice.

Zechariah 8:4-6 provides a picture of the sort of peace that God's wrath will establish:

Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. Thus says the Lord of hosts: Even though it seems impossible to the remnant of this people in these days, should it also seem impossible to me, says the Lord of hosts?