The Prophetic Imagination

by Walter Brueggemann

  Jesus’ Birth

  The birth of Jesus itself represents a decisive criticism of the dominant consciousness. The Lucan account of his solidarity with the poor and the Matthean presentation of his abrasive conflict with the powers that be (seen in the birth narratives) both point to the emergence of an alternative consciousness. No attempt, of course, needs to be made to harmonize the two versions as they move in different directions for different reasons and make different affirmations. Nevertheless, in completed form they are perfectly complementary in dismantling by criticism and in energizing by amazement.

  The Gospel of Matthew. The dismantling in the Matthean version is found in Matt 2:16-23. The episode juxtaposes the destructive rage of the pseudo-king (v. 16) and the grief of the prophetic tradition (v. 17). The rage of Herod is presented as the last gasp of the old order and the desperate attempt to hold on to the old way.

  As in ancient Israel, it is characteristic of kings to deny the end of the old order and, in their blindness, to take any steps to perpetuate what has in fact already ended. Thus Herod engages in self-deception and denial using his best talents, but they are not enough because the king cannot stop the end. In contrast to this is the pathos of Rachel, seen in Jeremiah. The raging of the king comes to an end in grief and lamentation. It is the work of the prophetic tradition to grieve the end, the very end the king cannot face, cannot stop, and surely cannot grieve.

  In the construction of Matthew 1, vv. 16-17 on king and prophet are preliminary, whereas vv. 18-23 carry the action. The contrast is complete: the king is dead and the angel brings the child to his future. Herod has clearly been outdone; he is no real king. Jesus is the real king (2:11), and the real king stands as a decisive negation of the no-king. The grieving of Rachel is a grieving for the ending that the king seemed to manage but that in the end undid the king. Indeed, the grieving of Rachel concerns both the ultimate criticism and the newness about to emerge from the criticism. That Jesus is presented as the alternative is signaled in vv. 22-23.[1] He is a Nazarene, which is to say surely a marginal, faithful one. He is marginal geographically (as a Galilean from Nazareth; vv. 22-23a); and he is also religiously marginal (as a Nazarite, that is, a consecrated one; see Num 6:1-21) embodying a poignant counter-reality—reality always to contrast and finally to destroy the dominant reality.

  The Gospel of Luke. In parallel fashion, the Lucan account of the disclosure to the shepherds, the representative marginal ones, announces a newness that will displace the old regime. Appropriately the recipients of unexpected newness are filled with wonder and awe (Luke 2:17-20). The intrusion embodied in the birth of Jesus causes a radical inversion:

  He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,

  he has put down the mighty from their thrones,

  and exalted those of low degree;

  he has filled the hungry with good things,

  and the rich he has sent empty away. (Luke 1:51-53)[2]

  The birth of Jesus brings a harsh end to a Herodian reality that seemed ordained forever, and it created a new historical situation for marginal people that none in their despair could have anticipated. While the Lucan version celebrates the emerging newness, the Matthean version places grief at the center of the narrative. The newness does not come without anguish, pain, and tears. The tears are for the last desperate destructiveness by the king to save himself. And they are for the victims of that ending because the king will not die alone; he will take with him those he can who appear to be the ones who threaten him. The beginning in Jesus does not come without harsh ending, for that which is ending never ends graciously.

  The Announcement of the Kingdom

  Herod had reasoned correctly. The coming of Jesus meant the abrupt end of things as they were. Two texts are commonly cited as programmatic for the preaching of Jesus. In Mark 1:15 he announces the coming of the kingdom. But surely implicit in the announcement is the counterpart that present kingdoms will end and be displaced. In Luke 4:18-19 he announces that a new age was beginning, but that announcement carries within it a harsh criticism of all those powers and agents of the present order.[3] His message was to the poor, but others kept them poor and benefited from their poverty. He addressed the captives (which means bonded slaves), but others surely wanted that arrangement unchanged. He named the oppressed, but there are never oppressed without oppressors.

  His ministry carried out the threat implicit in these two fundamental announcements. The ministry of Jesus is, of course, criticism that leads to radical dismantling. And as is characteristic, the guardians and profiteers of the present stability are acutely sensitive to any change that may question or challenge the present arrangement. Very early Jesus is correctly perceived as a clear and present danger to that order, and this is the problem with the promissory newness of the gospel: it never promises without threatening, it never begins without ending something, it never gives gifts without also assessing harsh costs. Jesus’ radical criticism may be summarized in several representative actions.

  Forgiveness. Jesus’ readiness to forgive sin (Mark 2:1-11), which evoked amazement (v. 12), also appeared to be blasphemy, that is to say, a threat to the present religious sanctions. At one level the danger is that Jesus stood in the role of God (v. 7) and therefore claimed too much; but we should not miss the radical criticism of society contained in the act. Hannah Arendt had discerned that this was Jesus’ most endangering action because if a society does not have an apparatus for forgiveness, then its members are fated to live forever with the consequences of any violation.[4] Thus the refusal to forgive sin (or the management of the machinery of forgiveness) amounts to enormous social control. While the claim of Jesus may have been religiously staggering, its threat to the forms of accepted social control was even greater.

  Sabbath. Jesus’ ability to heal and his readiness to do it on the Sabbath (Mark 3:1-6) evoked a conspiracy to kill him (v. 6). The violation is concerned not with the healing but with the Sabbath. Already in Mark 2:23-28 he has raised the issue, and obviously Jesus’ understanding of the Sabbath is that it had become a way of enslavement. Predictably, the objection comes from those who managed the Sabbath and benefited from it. The Sabbath thus stood as the sacred sign of a social settlement, and to call that special day into question unsettled the entire settlement. The day that came to articulate social order was now transformed into an occasion for freedom, freedom that rejected the settlement.[5]

  Table fellowship. Jesus was willing to eat with outcasts (Mark 2:15-17), which threatened the fundamental morality of society. The outcasts were the product of a legal arrangement that determined what was acceptable and unacceptable, clean and unclean, right and wrong. Crossing over the barrier of right and wrong implied that in the dispensing of mercy the wrong were as entitled as were the right, and therefore all meaningful distinctions were obliterated.

  Healing and Exorcism. Further distinctive aspects of Jesus’ prophetic ministry are his healings and exorcisms. He touched those afflicted with illness, loss, torment, and demonic possession; and he addressed both the personal and communal aspects of these experiences. These are radical acts because they cross boundaries—including rather than excluding—fearlessly reaching out to those deemed unclean by society (Mark 7:24-30), sinners (Mark 2:1-12), and under God’s judgment (John 9:1). Note the important connection between these stories and those about the prophets Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings 17—2 Kings 10). Like the gospel stories, the accounts of Elijah and Elisha were told in the context of conflict in political-religion, the abuse of royal power, and the disenfranchisement of the peasants. The political import of Jesus exorcizing the Gerasene’s demons called “Legion,” for example, would not be missed by villagers living in land controlled by Rome’s troops (Mark 5:1-13).[6] All these actions are signs of God’s reign breaking through (Matt 4:23; Luke 7:18-23).

  Women. Jesus’ association in public with women who were not his kin was a scandalous breech of decorum and a challenge to the gender bou
ndaries of the first century. He let a socially outcast woman touch him (Luke 7:36-50). He spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:1-26). He healed a woman with a flow of blood (Mark 5:25-34). And women traveled with him around Galilee and then to Jerusalem (Mark 15:40-41). Jesus’ proclamation of God’s reign and the attendant healing, eating, and community-building was not to be only a male enterprise, but an inclusive one.[7]

  Taxes and Debt. Jesus often refers to debt in the gospels. Connected with this, the day-laborers were likely peasants who had lost their land due to heavy taxation (Matt 20:1-16). One of the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer specifically mentions reciprocal debt forgiveness (Matt 6:12; Luke 11:4), and this was not likely metaphorical. And Jesus’ enigmatic saying about paying taxes (Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:26) was at least open to the interpretation that he was a tax resister (Luke 23:2). The reason for Jesus speaking out about these issues of political-economy was the weight of taxes, tithes, tolls, rents, and confiscation on the peasants of Galilee and Judea.[8]

  Temple. Jesus’ attitude toward the temple (Mark 11:15-19; John 2:18-22) was finally the most ominous threat because there he spoke directly about the destruction. In so doing he of course voiced the intent of the enemies of the church and of the state. Moreover, in his speech about the temple he quotes from the temple sermon of Jeremiah (Jer 7:11), thereby mobilizing that painful memory of dismantling criticism and in fact radically replicating it here.[9] In critiquing the temple, Jesus struck at the center of the doctrine of election, which can be traced in the Zion tradition at least as far back as Isaiah and which assumed a guaranteed historical existence for this special people gathered around this special shrine. Thus Jesus advances the critical tradition of Jeremiah against the royal tradition reflected in Isaiah.[10]

  All these actions, together with Jesus’ other violations of social convention, are a heavy criticism of the “righteousness of the law.” The law had become in his day a way for the managers of society, religious even more than civil, to effectively control not only morality but the political-economic valuing that lay behind the morality. Thus his criticism of the “law” is not to be dismissed as an attack on “legalism” in any moralistic sense, as is sometimes done in reductionist Pauline interpretation. Rather, his critique concerns the fundamental social valuing of his society. In practice Jesus has seen, as Marx later made clear, that the law can be a social convention to protect the current distribution of economic and political power.[11] Jesus, in the tradition of Jeremiah, dared to articulate the end of a consciousness that could not keep its promises but that in fact denied the very humanness it purported to give. As is always the case, it is a close call to determine if in fact Jesus caused the dismantling or if he voiced what was indeed about to happen in any case. But Jesus, along with the other prophets, is regularly treated as though giving voice is causing the dismantling. And indeed, in such a consciousness that may be the reality.

  We may note in passing that in the temple-cleansing narrative as well as in the Matthean birth narrative it is the Jeremiah tradition that is mentioned. Moreover, in the Matthean version of eating with sinners (Matt 9:10-13), as well as in working on the Sabbath (Matt 12:5-6), the appeal is to Hos 6:6. It is certainly important that appeal is made precisely to the most radical and anguished prophets of the dismantling.

  Compassion

  Jesus in his solidarity with the marginal ones is moved to compassion. Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness. In the arrangement of “lawfulness” in Jesus’ time, as in the ancient empire of Pharaoh, the one unpermitted quality of relation was compassion. Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion. The norms of law (social control) are never accommodated to persons, but persons are accommodated to the norms. Otherwise the norms will collapse and with them the whole power arrangement. Thus the compassion of Jesus is to be understood not simply as a personal emotional reaction but as a public criticism in which he dares to act upon his concern against the entire numbness of his social context. Empires live by numbness. Empires, in their militarism, expect numbness about the human cost of war. Corporate economies expect blindness to the cost in terms of poverty and exploitation. Governments and societies of domination go to great lengths to keep the numbness intact. Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion and with his compassion takes the first step by making visible the odd abnormality that had become business as usual. Thus compassion that might be seen simply as generous goodwill is in fact criticism of the system, forces, and ideologies that produce the hurt. Jesus enters into the hurt and finally comes to embody it.

  The characteristic Greek word for compassion, splagchnoisomai, means to let one’s innards embrace the feeling or situation of another.[12] Thus Jesus embodies the hurt that the marginal ones know by taking it into his own person and his own history. Their hurt came from being declared outside the realm of the normal, and Jesus engages with them in a situation of abnormality. Concretely, his criticism as embodied hurt is expressed toward the sick: “As he went ashore he saw a great throng; and he had compassion on them, and healed them” (Matt 14:14). And toward the hungry:

  As he went ashore he saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. (Mark 6:34)

  “I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days, and have nothing to eat.” (Mark 8:2)

  And toward the one who grieved the dead:

  And as he drew near to the gate of the city, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow; and a large crowd from the city was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her. (Luke 7:12-13)

  More programmatically, his compassion is for the whole range of human persons who are harassed and helpless:

  And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (Matt 9:35-36)

  Matthew has taken the saying that Mark has in the setting of the feeding and made it a more general statement, both by placing it at a narrative transition and by inserting the words “harassed and helpless.” Those words are polemical, for the people did not get helpless by themselves but were rendered helpless. And to speak of harassment is to suggest that some others are doing the harassing. Thus the Matthean version is much more direct and critical. Moreover, the Matthean saying has attending it a harsh judgment statement: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt 9:37-38). The image of harvest clearly is one of dismantling judgment. The juxtaposition of “harvest” with “helpless and harassed” puts the present ordering and its managers on notice.

  Again we may note the appeal to the radical prophetic tradition. The internalization of hurt for the marginal ones is especially faithful to the tradition of anguish in Hosea and Jeremiah. In Hosea the internalization of hurt is especially clear in 11:8-9: “My heart recoils within me, my compassion (reh.em) grows warm and tender.” The same internalization is evident in Jeremiah as I have presented it. Both prophets and now Jesus after them bring to expression and embodiment all the hurt, human pain, and grief that the dominant royal culture has tried so hard to repress, deny, and cover over.

  It is instructive that in the teaching of Jesus it is precisely his two best-known parables that contain the word under discussion. First, in the narrative of the good Samaritan it is the Samaritan who has compassion (Luke 10:33).[13] Second, in the story of the prodigal son, it is precisely the father who has compassion (Luke 15:20). Clearly the key person in each of these parables embodies the alte
rnative consciousness from which the dominant consciousness is criticized. Both the Samaritan and the father are Jesus’ peculiar articulation against the dominant culture, and so they stand as a radical threat. The Samaritan by his action judges the dominant way by disregard of the marginal. The ones who pass by, obviously carriers of the dominant tradition, are numbed, indifferent, and do not notice. The Samaritan expresses a new way that displaces the old arrangements in which outcasts are simply out. The replacing of numbness with compassion, that is, the end of cynical indifference and the beginning of noticed pain, signals a social revolution. In similar fashion, the father, by his ready embrace of his unacceptable son, condemns the “righteousness of the law” by which society is currently ordered and by which social rejects are forever rejected. Thus the stories, if seen as radical dismantling criticism, bring together the internalization of pain and external transformation. The capacity to feel the hurt of the marginal people means an end to all social arrangements that nullified pain by a remarkable depth of numbness.