The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word

Chapter 3. Loss Imagined as Divine Judgment

45 Chapter 3 Loss Imagined as Divine Judgment In their severe honesty, the prophets took the world as it was in front of them. But they saw that world very differently, because they saw it according to the God of the remembered imagination of the Torah tradition. And because they saw it differently, perforce, they spoke it differently. They could not do otherwise. Thus my thesis: Prophetic preaching is an effort to imagine the world as though YHWH, the creator of heaven and earth, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whom we Christians name as Father, Son, and Spirit, is a real character and decisive agent in the world. I The great prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries bce—Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, the ones we name first as prophets—saw that the world of Israel-Judah (and the capital cities of Samaria and Jerusalem) was a society committed to long-term loss, grief, and, finally, termination. They perceived their society in this way because they recognized that their society was profoundly out of sync with the reality of YHWH, so out of sync that it could not endure. Not everyone, of course, perceived their world in this way. Those committed to the dominant reality of king and temple, not surprisingly , could not believe that such a loss was possible. They are the ones who 46 The Practice of Prophetic Imagination said, in liturgical formulation, “Shalom, Shalom,” when there was no shalom (Jer. 6:11; 8:14; Ezek. 13:10). But these prophets knew otherwise. What they knew otherwise evoked in them deep, daring, uncompromising poetry. What they offered was not more than poetry. But that poetry served well because it was an elusive articulation not easily co-opted or countered by the excessive certitude and high-handed dismissiveness of dominant imagination. The Old Testament knows all about loss and grief.1 It stands in the deep ancient Near Eastern culture of grief that it makes its own. At the most intimate level—that of personal, familial loss—Israel voices its grief. Father Jacob, when he finds the robe of his beloved son Joseph, makes the connection: “It is my son’s robe!” (Gen. 37:33). And then we are told: “Then Jacob tore his garments, and put sackcloth on his loins, and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and all his daughters sought to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted, and said, ‘No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning’” (vv. 34-35). He refused to be comforted! He wept all his days at his loss. By the time of Jeremiah, the imagery has moved from father Jacob to mother Rachel. But it is the same grief: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more. (Jer. 31:15) Rachel could be comforted no more than Jacob. Only now it is not only their son Joseph who is lost. Now it is Israel lost, Jerusalem lost, all lost. And by the time of Matthew, when King Herod sought out all the baby boys in his sweep against imagined terrorists, the evangelist can quote: Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” (Matt 2:17-18) Rachel weeps and Jacob weeps, all Jews weep. The church weeps. And God weeps. And before we finish, we come to Emil Fackenheim, who dares to Loss Imagined as Divine Judgment 47 say, “God Himself, as it were, weeps for His children. He weeps not for symbolic children in a symbolic exile, but for actual children in an actual exile. He weeps as would a flesh-and-blood father or mother. He weeps as Rachel does.”2 And then Fackenheim quotes the record from Nuremberg on Ausch­ witz: “When the extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers was at its height, orders were issued that the children were to be thrown straight into the crematorium furnaces, or into the pit near the crematorium, without being gassed first.”3 Jewish tears are endless for the loss. And King David is like father Jacob. This man of immense power is a griever because...