The Prophetic Imagination

by Walter Brueggemann

  The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord. Notice that I suggest for the prophet in a really numbed situation a quite elemental and modest task. That task has three parts:

  1. To offer symbols that are adequate to confront the horror and massiveness of the experience that evokes numbness and requires denial. The prophet provides a way in which the cover-up and the stonewalling can be ended. This does not mean that symbols are to be invented, for that would be too thin. Rather, it means that the prophet is to reactivate out of our historical past symbols that always have been vehicles for redemptive honesty, for example, “cross over to Shiloh to see what I did,” or finally, take another look at Pharaoh.[5] The Exodus symbol, above all, is turned to show for all would-be pharaohs that Exodus is a catastrophic ending of what had seemed forever.

  2. To bring to public expression those very fears and terrors that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we do not know they are there. The public expression of fear and terror, of course, requires not analytic speech and not the language of coercion but the language of metaphor, so that the expression can be touched at many points by different people. Thus the prophet must speak evocatively to bring to the community the fear and the pain that individual persons want so desperately to share and to own but are not permitted to do so. It is obvious that much caricatured prophetic speech serves only to encourage the suppression rather than to end it. This speech requires neither abrasive rejections nor maudlin assurances but an honest articulation of how it is perceived when seen from the perspective of the passion of God.

  3. To speak metaphorically but concretely about the real deathliness that hovers over us and gnaws within us, and to speak neither in rage nor with cheap grace, but with the candor born of anguish and passion.[6] The deathliness among us is not the death of a long life well lived but the death introduced in that royal garden of Genesis 2–3, which is surely a Solomonic story about wanting all knowledge and life delivered to our royal management.[7] That death is manifested in alienation, loss of patrimony, and questing for new satiations that can never satisfy, and we are driven to the ultimate consumerism of consuming each other.

  The prophet does not scold or reprimand. The prophet brings to public expression the dread of endings, the collapse of our self-madeness, the barriers and pecking orders that secure us at each other’s expense, and the fearful practice of eating off the table of a hungry brother or sister. It is the task of the prophet to invite the king to experience what he must experience, what he most needs to experience and most fears to experience, namely, that the end of the royal fantasy is very near. The end of the royal fantasy will permit a glimpse of the true king who is no fantasy, but we cannot see the real king until the fantasy is shown to be a fragile and perishing deception. Precisely in the year of the death of the so-called king does the prophet and the prophet’s company see the real king high and lifted up (Isa 6:1).

  I believe that the proper idiom for the prophet in cutting through the royal numbness and denial is the language of grief, the rhetoric that engages the community in mourning for a funeral they do not want to admit. It is indeed their own funeral.

  I have been increasingly impressed with the capacity of the prophet to use the language of lament and the symbolic creation of a death scene as a way of bringing to reality what the king must see and will not. And I believe that grief and mourning, that crying in pathos, is the ultimate form of criticism, for it announces the sure end of the whole royal arrangement.[8]

  Jeremiah

  In this context I suggest Jeremiah as the clearest model for prophetic imagination and ministry. He is a paradigm for those who address the numb and denying posture of people who do not want to know what they have or what their neighbors have. Jeremiah is frequently misunderstood as a doomsday spokesman or a pitiful man who had a grudge and sat around crying; but his public and personal grief was for another reason and served another purpose. Jeremiah embodies the alternative consciousness of Moses in the face of the denying king.[9] He grieves the grief of Judah because he knows what the king refuses to know. It is clear that Jeremiah did not in anger heap scorn on Judah but rather articulated what was in fact present in the community whether they acknowledged it or not. He articulated what the community had to deny in order to continue the self-deception of achievable satiation. He affirmed that all the satiation was a quick eating of self to death. Jeremiah knew long before the others that the end was coming and that God had had enough of indifferent affluence, cynical oppression, and presumptive religion. He knew that the freedom of God had been so grossly violated (as in Genesis 2–3) that death was at the door and would not pass over. The prophets do not ask much or expect much. In his grieving, Jeremiah asked only that the royal community face up to its real experience, so close to the end. What both prophet and king knew was that to experience that reality was in fact to cease to be king.

  The grief of Jeremiah was at two levels. First, it was the grief he grieved for the end of his people. And that was genuine grief because he cared about this people and he knew that God cared about this people. But the second dimension of his grief, more intense, was because no one would listen and no one would see what was so transparent to him. So his grief was kept sharp and painful because he had to face regularly the royal consciousness, which insisted “peace, peace” when apparently only he knew there was no peace. I think I do not exaggerate or overstate here. My judgment is that nearly every situation of ministry includes this component of deception and the terrible dread of letting our rule come to an end, whether it is no more than tyranny in a marriage or supervision of my favorite anger or hatred. We want nothing that secures us to die!

  The ministry of grief for Jeremiah is not one of self-pity. Seeing what he saw among his people, it was the only appropriate response. Jeremiah had seen what was there for all to see if only they would look, but the others refused to look, simply denied, and were unable to see. The royal folk had for so long lived in a protective, fake world that their perceptual field was skewed and with their best looking they could not see what was there to see. Isaiah’s anticipation had been granted:

  Make the heart of this people fat,

  and their ears heavy,

  and shut their eyes;

  lest they see with their eyes,

  and hear with their ears,

  and understand with their hearts,

  and turn and be healed. (Isa 6:10)

  He need not have worried. To turn and be healed they will not. So in his anguish over what is happening, and in his greater anguish over the wholesale denial, Jeremiah presents his poetry.

  My impression is that one could open Jeremiah’s poetry almost anywhere and find this ministry of articulated grief. As we explore his words it is important to remember that he lived very near the deB.C.E. the Babylonian exile (beginning in 598 B.C.E.) and the fall of Jerusalem (587 B.C.E.). His passion is, as Abraham Heschel has seen, the passion of this God who knows what time it is (Jer 8:7).[10] God knows, and his prophet knows with him, that it is end time. The king does not know, never knows, what time it is because the king wants to banish time and live in an uninterrupted eternal now. God has time for his people and God insists his people take his time seriously.[11] The church in word and by steeple clock announces what time it is and that we must live in God’s time. But the king would have it be like a casino in Las Vegas where there is no clock and no time, no beginning and no end, no time to speak or to answer, but only an enduring and unchanging now.

  Consider these ways in which Jeremiah penetrates the numbness of the royal consciousness by articulating the grief it so much wants to deny. The grief is over the death of Judah, the very Judah the kings presumed must live forever:

  My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain!

  Oh, the walls of my heart!

  My heart is beating wildly;

  I cannot keep silent;r />
  for I hear the sound of the trumpet,

  the alarm of war.

  Disaster follows hard on disaster,

  the whole land is laid waste.

  Suddenly my tents are destroyed,

  my curtains in a moment. (Jer 4:19-20)

  His grief is expressed as a public, visible event—the actual invasion and slaughter of his people. He describes with remarkable vividness a near play-by-play of the disaster as it reaches his own bedroom. Nevertheless, that public event is matched by an internal wrenching in which his heart quakes and storms in fear and his very bowels are gripped by terror.

  In the poetry that follows he casts a cosmic image of the end of creation:

  I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;

  and to the heavens, and they had no light.

  I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,

  and all the hills moved to and fro.

  I looked, and lo, there was no man,

  and all the birds of the air had fled.

  I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,

  and all its cities were laid in ruins,

  before the Lord, before his fierce anger. (Jer 4:23-26)

  But the poetry is more than the end of creation. Recall that I have suggested creation is a work guaranteed by the king. The king is the one charged to order and preserve creation, and thus the return to chaos implicitly announces the failure of kingship and its end. There is no creation because there is no king. The very thing that justified kingship has been lost. So whatever else, the royal folk are confronted with a future in which they do not figure.

  In the poetry of chapters 8–10, Jeremiah provides a rich supply of metaphors designed to break the numbness. First there is an image about the utter misreading of the situation. There is a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to weep and a time to laugh (Eccl 3:4); but Judah does not know what time it is:

  Even the stork in the heavens

  knows her times;

  and the turtledove, swallow, and crane

  keep the time of their coming;

  but my people know not

  the ordinance of the Lord. (Jer 8:7; see 4:22)

  It is crying time. It is death time and they imagine such time never comes. After a war scenario of charging horses, the prophet turns wistful:

  Is there no balm in Gilead?

  Is there no physician there?

  Why then has the health of the daughter of my people

  not been restored?

  O that my head were waters,

  and my eyes a fountain of tears,

  that I might weep day and night

  for the slain daughter of my people!

  O that I had in the desert

  a wayfarer’s lodging place,

  that I might leave my people

  and go away from them! (Jer 8:22—9:2)

  In his opening concerning the balm, the prophet asks a question. He does not make an affirmation as in the African American spiritual (“There Is a Balm in Gilead”), but leaves the question unanswered. The second question is asked in deeper pathos: Is there no doctor?[12] Failing an answer he must now deepen his expression of pain. The answer was not given because answering is the way of royal Israel. Now it is time not for answers but for questions that defy answers because the royal answering service no longer functions. Answers from that source presume control and symmetry. And that is gone.

  So the prophet speaks his grief at the lack of resolution. He cannot cry enough. More tears need to be cried than his eyes will permit. There is not enough time, even day and night, for this death of all death, “the slain daughter of my people.” First there is no answer. Then inadequate tears. And third the wish for flight: “O that I had a place in the desert . . . because they are treacherous, they proceed from evil to evil, that do not know me, says the Lord.” The cry, the grief, the pain of death is that of Yahweh. They do not know Yahweh. They do not know how to reckon with the really free one who will cause endings. He fits none of their categories, and they can’t “get a handle” on him. So they persist in treating him like every other one; but it brings no relief because he will be God of the endings. He is not to be avoided.

  Jeremiah can feel empathy for the royal folk. He yearns for the peace as much as they do. He too wants business as usual, but death has now changed all that: “We looked for peace, but no good came, for a time of healing, but behold, terror” (8:15). This most eloquent of all prophets cannot find words to bring the grief to public expression: “My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me” (8:18). Capacity for clear thinking and faithful deciding has been lost. This is not just a little play-acting for public edification. His whole life has now been claimed to embody the grief of dead Judah. It is the grief Yahweh knows that he would share with his people, but they cannot, and so Jeremiah must answer for his whole people.

  In his long and eloquent statement on kings in chapter 22, the prophet has chastened and castigated, commended, and cajoled. After all that, he comes to the tragic boy-king, Jehoiachin, here called Coniah. The boy is innocent but must pay for the dynasty and must bear in his body the punishment of the whole family. He is Judah, exiled Judah, and Jeremiah assigns to him the grief of all Judah.

  In 22:28 Jeremiah begins grieving for this one who is innocent and forgotten, with no more claims to make: “Is this man Coniah a despised broken pot, a vessel no one cares for?” Then he issues the most poignant lament in the whole Bible. The whole land is mobilized to grieve the tragedy: “O land, land, land!” (22:29). And then the dynasty is ended: “Write this man down as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days; for none of his offspring shall succeed . . .” (22:30). The tear in the heart of Jeremiah is unspeakable. He does not gloat or rejoice. He would rather this king could rescue royal Judah—but it is very late.

  The prophet knows he is inadequate for the grieving of Israel’s death, so he asks for public grief: “Take up weeping and wailing for the mountains, and a lamentation for the pastures of the wilderness” (9:10). In this he echoes the expectation of Amos that what is to happen must be brought to public expression:

  In all the squares there shall be wailing;

  and in all the streets they shall say, “Alas! alas!”

  They shall call the farmers to mourning

  and to wailing those who are skilled in lamentation.

  (Amos 5:16)

  Not only did Amos call for grief, but he did so as he presented forsaken ravaged Israel:

  Fallen, no more to rise,

  is the virgin Israel;

  forsaken on her land,

  with none to raise her up. (Amos 5:1-2)

  That image of a dying one is picked up by Jeremiah and characteristically made more radical, for now the lady is no longer a virgin but a tramp, a whore all dressed up with no place to go:

  And you, O desolate one,

  what do you mean that you dress in scarlet,

  that you deck yourself with ornaments of gold,

  that you enlarge your eyes with paint?

  In vain you beautify yourself.

  Your lovers despise you . . .

  For I heard a cry as of a woman in travail,

  anguish as of one bringing forth her first child,

  the cry of the daughter of Zion gasping for breath,

  stretching out her hands,

  Woe is me! I am fainting before murderers. (Jer 4:30-31)

  It is like a woman in labor, but there is no birth here, only death; there is the desperate gasping and then there is silence. Judah has ended.

  First the prophet states his own grieving. Then he “goes public” and includes the professionals. And then in a remarkable statement he depicts the mother of Israel, beloved Rachel,

  grieving:[13]

  A voice is heard in Ramah,

  lamentation and bitter weeping.

  Rachel is weeping for her children;

  she refuses to be comforted for her chi
ldren,

  because they are not. (Jer 31:15)

  Neither Jeremiah nor his contemporaries are adequate to this grief. It must be done by the one who in anguish gave birth and in anguish now faces her children’s death. There is no comfort anymore; not comforted: they are not! The death of the unthinkable end is matched to the birth of the unthinkable miracle of beginning. Now it has been said. They are not; not exile; not punished. Just not! And that is beyond either consolation or explanation. This poetry is among the boldest in ancient Israel, for the situation requires audacity. Imagine bringing back mother Rachel to grieve her darling. There can only be grief, for

  Your hurt is incurable,

  and your wound is grievous.

  There is none to uphold your cause,

  no medicine for your wound,

  no healing for you. (Jer 30:12-13)

  There can be only death. And then the imagery is pressed to its extremity:

  Is Ephraim my dear son?

  Is he my darling child?

  For as often as I speak against him,

  I do remember him still. (Jer 31:20)

  Yahweh is grieving and will not turn loose. The language permits the words of Jeremiah to transcend the person of the prophet. This grief will not be dismissed as the idiosyncrasy of Jeremiah, for it is nothing less than God’s grief over his dead child.[14] And God would not grieve that death if there were a way to prevent it. There is no assurance or announcement of hope; there is only yearning that is admittedly hope-filled, but it stops short of knowing too much or claiming too much. Jeremiah has pressed where his contemporaries would not readily go, to the pain of God, to a place where only Hosea had ventured before. Yahweh is no longer an enemy who must punish or destroy but the helpless parent who must stand alongside death, like Mary at Calvary, like David over Absalom, “My child, my child,” but he is helpless and can only grieve.[15] The drift toward death is so far advanced that none—not king, not temple, not even Yahweh—can keep it from happening. Eventually mercy may be granted, but not before death. At most there is here an enigmatic yearning, even by Yahweh, that history would not take its ruthless course.