But the narrative moves as quickly as possible from criticism to energy. The narrative does not want to linger with those who cannot face the news, and it does not grieve long for what is old and over. It looks to the future. It is a future given precisely where none was thinkable, an energizing that is in the tradition of Moses and Second Isaiah, though surely more radical in its historical concreteness:
They feared him because all the multitude was astonished at his teaching. (Mark 11:18)
The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner. (Luke 11:38)
Those words cover a variety of responses, which for our purposes do not need to be distinguished. They range from awe to surprise to terror to indignation. In general, Jesus’ healings evoke amazement of a celebrative kind because they give life where all seemed hopeless. At the same time, his teaching evokes astonishment that includes a tone of negativity, resistance, and indignation, for Jesus contends with the conventions of his contemporaries. On the one hand, there is surprise that futures can be given to people who seemed to have no future. On the other hand, there is resentment that he would say and do as he did. In either case, his ministry evoked a passion and an energy that had disappeared in the old helplessness. Both his adherents and his enemies sensed the same thing: An unmanaged newness was coming, and it created a future quite different from the one that royal domination intended to permit.
Jesus’ Teachings
The teachings of Jesus, of course, cannot be separated from the actions of his ministry. His teachings evoked radical energy, for they announced as sure and certain what had been denied by careful conspiracy. If anything, his teachings were more radical than his actions, for his teachings played out the implications of the harsh challenge and radical transformation at which his actions hinted. It was one thing to eat with outcasts, but it was far more radical to announce that the distinctions between insiders and outsiders were null and void. It was one thing to heal/forgive but quite another to announce that the conditions which had made one sick/guilty were now irrelevant. Of course the teachings cannot be separated from the actions, for it is the actions that give concreteness and reality to the teachings. The teachings, like the actions, are shattering, opening, and inviting. They conjure futures that had been closed off, and they indicate possibilities that had been defined as impossibilities. For our consideration it will be adequate to focus on the Beatitudes because they form an appropriate counterpart to the woes, especially as Luke has presented them (Luke 6:20-26).[6] For our purposes, the juxtaposition of woes and blessings is appropriate. The woes constitute the most radical criticism, for they are announcements and anticipations of death. The woes of Luke are pronounced against the rich (v. 24), the full (v. 25a), the ones who laugh (v. 25b), and the ones who enjoy social approval (v. 26)—which is to say that the death sentence is upon those who live fully and comfortably in this age without awareness or openness to the new future coming. In sharp contrast, the blessings are speeches of new energy, for they promise future well-being to those who are without hope. In the deathly world of riches, fullness, and uncritical laughter, those who now live in poverty, hunger, and grief are hopeless. They are indeed nonpersons consigned to nonhistory. They have no public existence, and so the public well-being can never extend to them. But the blessings open a new possibility. So the speech of Jesus, like the speech of the entire prophetic tradition, moves from woe to blessing, from judgment to hope, from criticism to energy. The alternative community to be shaped from the poor, hungry, and grieving is called to disengage from the woe pattern of life to end its fascination with that other ordering, and to embrace the blessing pattern.
The hope Jesus announces here is heavy and hard. It contrasts sharply with the cheap and cross-free hope of the royal consciousness. Hope is easy and flimsy for those who already have richness, fullness, and laughter now; but hope is hard for those who are denied the riches, prevented from fullness, and have no reason to laugh. The strangeness of this prophetic energizing is that it is addressed precisely to the nonpersons consigned to nonhistory. What is offered here is not a general moral reflection but a concrete offer to a specific constituency with a direct sanctioning of an alternative way. So the Lucan teaching is with “his eyes on his disciples” (Luke 6:20). His disciples constitute precisely the ones disengaged from the old ordering that is under criticism and lacks energy. His disciples are those who have been denied riches, prevented from fullness, and have no reason to laugh, those who are able to disengage from the woe pattern of life that can only lead to death, who have ended their fascination with that other ordering, and who can believe that these new words open up futures that the royal consciousness cannot offer.
These three blessing statements, surely a Lucan sample expressed as a longer list in Matthew, clearly express the issues of criticism and energy. Criticism to death is for those who have riches, for riches reflect the world of Pharaoh and Solomon and always concern the use of the goods of the brothers and sisters. The way of exploitation and confiscation leads to death. This is an old prophetic critique, but it is matched by this remarkable futuring. The new futuring of God is for those who have not only resisted these exploitative practices but have been victimized by them. The future will be given not to people in their fullness but to those who have been forcibly denied enough. The future is given to those who are experienced in groaning. The future is denied to those who have been cynical and calloused and self-deceiving enough to rejoice in the present ordering and are unable to grieve about the ruin toward which the royal community is headed.
Jesus’ teaching in these hard sayings reflects two central issues of the prophetic tradition. First, the word is addressed to and received by a minority community consisting of marginal people. The prophetic word of criticism is addressed to the dominant community, but it will not be heard (Isa 6:9-10). The prophetic word of energy is addressed never to the dominant community but only to those who are denied the pseudo-energy and power of the royal consciousness. Second, the promissory, prophetic word concerns a radical turn, a break with the old rationality, and a discontinuity between what has been and what will be. Thus the teaching presumed a contrast between that to which we cling and a future for which we yearn. The ministry of Jesus, like the ministry of Second Isaiah, happens in the space between the clinging and the yearning. If there is only clinging, then the words are only critical. If there is yearning, there is a chance that the words are energizing. The staggering works of Jesus—feeding, healing, casting out, forgiving—happened not to those who held on to the old order but to those who yearned because the old order had failed them or squeezed them out.
The Beatitudes are cunningly articulated to sharpen the contrasts. The woes describe the royal consciousness and, in that situation, there is mostly the energy of fear. By contrast, those who have now broken with that consciousness, whose lives are organized against those values, and who know that the royal community cannot keep it promises, are the ones who are opened to another future. That future is an unqualified yes from God. The energy of this blessing word comes in the reality that God has alternative futures, that he is free to bestow them, and that futures are not derived from or determined by the present. Thus this teaching is faithful to the work of Moses, who created an underived community. It reflects the joy of Second Isaiah, who evoked a community not derived from the Babylonian reality. And, like Second Isaiah, Jesus is able to articulate a future that is distinctly different from an unbearable present. But that future is energizing only for those for whom the present has become unbearable. For those people and that community the abrasion takes the form of promise; the judgment takes the form of energy; the condemnation takes the form of hope. Believers in that future given by God are able to sing and to dance, to heal and to forgive. All those actions that the numb cannot take are given to believers in that future.
The people who receive the compassion of Jesus experience it as authority. They had been living unauthorized lives b
ecause they knew that the claimant kings were both unauthorized themselves and incapable of authorizing anyone else. But the vulnerable solidarity of Jesus with the poor, empty, and grieving was found to have an authenticity and a power unlike what they had known. They found him to be radically disinterested and therefore profoundly for us. That is exactly the learning Moses’ Israel was given about Yahweh. Unlike the pharaohs and the gods of the pharaohs, Yahweh was disinterested, and so his intervention had power and authority. The authority of Jesus, his power to transform strangely, was found precisely in his own poverty, hunger, and grieving over the death of his people. In his poverty he had the power to make many rich (2 Cor 8:9). In his hunger he had the capacity to fill others. In his capacity to grieve he had the power to bring joy and wholeness to others. In his person, which was nonperson in the eyes of the pseudokings, he had the authority to give futures to his constituency.
Jesus’ Resurrection
Such a way of discerning the sovereign power of his gracious compassion leads directly to the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate energizing for the new future. The wrenching of Friday had left only the despair of Saturday (Luke 24:21), and the disciples had no reason to expect Sunday after that Friday. The resurrection cannot be explained on the basis of the previously existing reality. The resurrection can only be received and affirmed and celebrated as the new action of God, whose province it is to create new futures for people and to let them be amazed in the midst of despair.
So it is my concern to show that the resurrection is faithful to and can only be understood in terms of the characteristically surprising energizing of the promises of the prophets. The resurrection of Jesus is not to be understood in good liberal fashion as a spiritual development in the church. Nor should it be too quickly handled as an oddity in the history of God or an isolated act of God’s power. Rather, it is the ultimate act of prophetic energizing in which a new history is initiated. It is a new history open to all but peculiarly received by the marginal victims of the old order. The fully energized Lord of the church is not some godly figure in the sky but the slain Lamb who stood outside the royal domain and was punished for it.
Without detracting from the historical singularity of the resurrection, we can also affirm that it is of a piece with the earlier appearances of an alternative future by the prophetic word. The resurrection of Jesus made possible a future for the disinherited. In the same way, the alternative community of Moses was given a new future by the God who brought freedom for slaves by his powerful word, which both dismantled and created a future and which engaged in radical energizing and radical criticizing. In the same way, the resurrection of Jesus made possible a future for the disinherited, as did the newness announced by Second Isaiah. The nonpeople in the nonhistory of Babylon were given a homecoming like the poor, hungry, and grieving in the history of Jesus.
The resurrection is a genuinely historical event in which the dead one rules. But that genuinely historical event has important political dimensions, as is recognized especially in Matthew. On the one hand, it is seen as a threat to the regime (Matt 28:11-15), whereas, on the other hand, the risen Jesus announces his new royal authority. He is now the king who displaces the king. His resurrection is the end of the nonhistory taught in the royal school and a new history begins for those who stood outside of history. This new history gives persons new identities (Matt 28:19) and a new ethic (28:20), even as it begins on the seashore among the dead enslavers (Exod 14:30).
* * *
On the distinction between hope and process or optimism, see Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), chaps. 1 and 3; also Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. J. W. Leitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), chap. 2. ↵
The census stands in Israel for the ability of the royal apparatus to regiment people against freedom and justice; thus it evokes curse (2 Samuel 24). Perhaps with intuitive correctness, the Chronicler has credited the policy to Satan (1 Chronicles 21). There is indeed something satanic about such an exercise of control. Frank Moore Cross links the census to the entire development of royal ideology (Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays on the History of the Religion of Israel [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973], 227–40). It is not difficult to see why it was later discerned as satanic. Thus the discernment of Satan as having socioeconomic dimensions. Walter Brueggemann, “2 Samuel 21–24: An Appendix of Deconstruction?” CBQ 50 (1988): 383–97; idem, First and Second Samuel, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox, 1990), 350–57; K. C. Hanson, “When the King Crosses the Line: Royal Deviance and Restitution in Levantine Ideologies,” BTB 26 (1996): 11–25. ↵
On the restoration of language as the first act of hope, see Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. E. R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). ↵
John J. Pilch, “Selecting an Appropriate Model: Leprosy—A Test Case,” in Healing in the New Testament: Insights from Medical and Mediterranean Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 39–54; Jerome H. Neyrey, “Clean/Unclean, Pure/Polluted, and Holy/Profane: The Idea and the System of Purity,” in The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation, ed. R. L. Rohrbaugh (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1996), 80–104. ↵
In commenting on the Beatitudes, José Porfirio Miranda observes the socioeconomic dimension to the blessing: “I wonder where there is more faith and hope: in believing ‘in the God who raises the dead’ (Rom 4:17) or in believing like Luke in the God who ‘filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty’ (Luke 1:53)?” (Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, trans. J. Eagleson [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1974], 217). ↵
On the claims of the Beatitudes, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution of Messianic Ecclesiology, trans. M. Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 80–81. He concludes that the “people of the Beatitudes” must be converted to the future. On the Beatitudes in general, see: Michael Crosby, The Spirituality of the Beatitudes: Matthew’s Challenge for First World Christians (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981); Hans Dieter Betz, “The Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3-12): Observations on Their Literary Form and Theological Significance,” in idem, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount, trans. L. L. Welborn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985) ,17–36; idem, The Sermon on the Mount, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994); K. C. Hanson, “How Honorable! How Shameful! A Cultural Interpretation of Matthew’s Makarisms and Reproaches,” Semeia 68 (1996): 81–111. ↵
7
A Note on the Practice of Ministry
Summary
First let me summarize the argument. Something new happened in history with the Exodus and the Moses movement. On the one hand, Moses intended the dismantling of the oppressive empire of Pharaoh; and on the other hand, he intended the formation of a new community focused on the religion of God’s freedom and the politics of justice and compassion. The dismantling begins in the groans and complaints of his people; the energizing begins in the doxologies of the new community.
The Moses movement is too radical for Israel, however; therefore, soon there is an attempt to counter the new history of energy. The old history of Pharaoh is continued in the monarchy of Israel. The monarchy, with its interest in self-securing, is effective in silencing the criticism and denying the energizing; but the kings never seem able to silence the prophets for long. The prophets of Israel continue the radical movement of Moses in the face of royal reality. On the one hand, Jeremiah practices the radical criticism against the royal consciousness. He does this essentially by conjuring a funeral and bringing the grief of dying Israel to public expression. He does this to penetrate the numb denial of the royal community, which pretended that things must go on forever. On the other hand, Second Isaiah practices radical energizing against the royal consciousness. He does this by conjuring an enthronement and bringing the amazement
of rebirthed Israel to public expression. He does this to penetrate the weary despair of the royal community, which assumed things were over forever.
Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet, and more than a prophet, I argue, practiced in most radical form the main elements of prophetic ministry and imagination. On the one hand, he practiced criticism of the deathly world around him. The dismantling was fully wrought in his crucifixion, in which he himself embodied the thing dismantled. On the other hand, he practiced the energizing of the new future given by God. This energizing was fully manifested in his resurrection, in which he embodied the new future given by God.
The Prophetic Imagination Page 16