The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage

by Richard Rohr

After leading the people out of Egyptian slavery, God supplied the law, including the Ten Commandments, that was meant to govern and shape their lives in the Promised Land.

This was Morality 101, the basic order without which a society cannot maintain itself.

They forgot not only what they had promised but also how much and how deeply Yahweh cared for them. There was a deep need, then and now, for someone who would call the people to return to God and to justice. Someone who would warn them, critique them, and reveal God’s heart to them. We call them prophets, and every religion needs them.

Maybe that is why the people of Jesus’s time were not ready for him. Their religious and spiritual community was too dispersed to know how to maintain a strong inner spiritual life.

I’m convinced that unless we know the lineage, the exact genre, and the unique approach of the Hebrew prophets, we really can’t understand Jesus.

our path to maturity usually involves some form of “cleaning up,” “growing up,” “waking up,” and “showing up,” more or less in that order.[4]

For example, the American political party that most blatantly hates law and order is invariably the one that loudly repeats the words law and order at every convention.

The prophet invariably makes you “drink” the taste of your poison so that you will avoid it, similar to much addiction work today.

The whole Bible can be seen as a chronicle of examples meant to assure us that we are not crazy if we accept this invitation to vulnerability before God and one another. Such an initial attitude of vulnerability, as my friend Brené Brown teaches so well, is where all relationships begin to blossom.[7] I am calling this surprising letting down of defenses—from both sides—the prophetic “way of tears,” as opposed to our more common ways of heroic willpower, commandment, obedience, force, anger, and legitimated violence.

It is a movement, frankly, from the Ten Commandments to the eight beatitudes.

We all know God is beyond gender.

Jesus, the ultimate prophet for many of us, said, “You received without charge, give without charge” (Matthew 10:8, jb). Giving without charge—and not expecting any pay—has been a gift of my Franciscan community and my solemn vow of poverty.

Jeremiah is rightly considered one of the major prophets. Not

A Jeremiah is someone who pronounces cosmic judgment and warns of the need for repentance and change.

But the actual Jeremiah is much more than that.

Eventually, they threw him in a cistern and left him to starve, but he was rescued by Ebed-melech, an Ethiopian eunuch in the king’s house who pulled him out with the help of three men (Jeremiah 38:7–13). Here we see the emerging

Jeremiah’s early resistance to God’s call has earned him the moniker “the Reluctant Prophet.” Who

In human history, only Jacob’s wrestling with the angel and the testimonies of medieval Catholic mystics like Teresa of Ávila match the intensity of Jeremiah’s struggle with the divine.

Franciscan,

think we can say that Jesus saw himself as a prophet of the Jeremiah lineage, emphasizing a lifestyle of justice and compassion instead of temple worship.

Authentic Christianity must be an utter commitment to reality, as opposed to ritual, or it is not a commitment to God.

The Bible is an inspired attempt to write down what reality is saying through nature and history, and only occasionally through personal biography. The continuous storyline is that the joys and disappointments of the visible world are revelations of a less visible one.

Faith is our attempt to recognize and trust such benevolence.

Progressives must get out of their heads and move beyond the political correctness that passes for enlightenment.

The divine love affair that characterizes the prophets is still mostly unknown to liberals or conservatives. Yet God still gifts both groups with their inherent goodness (really, God’s goodness) and sets us all up to share this same wondrous gratuity with the rest of the world.

As much as any person in Scripture, Job was acquainted with the tears of things. Elijah, Jonah, and John the Baptizer could only go so far, but Job embodies the transformed perspective of a mature prophet. (Islam seems to understand this, since Job appears as one of the twenty-five prophets named in the Koran.)[4]

The book of Job is considered the conclusion, the summit, and the dead end of the Old Testament.

conjunctio: the combining of contrary ingredients solutio: a loss of one substance to create a new admixture sublimatio: refining lesser ingredients into higher ones coagulatio: turning something ephemeral into something concrete calcinatio: the hardening needed to coalesce into substance mortificatio: necessary dying for movement between stages putrefactio: changing even to the point of appearing unattractive

“The answer that demands the fewest assumptions is likely the correct one.”

The better answer is almost always the simpler one was his conclusion.

What I have tried to say in this book is that prophets are those who simplify all questions of justice, reward, and punishment by a simple appeal to divine love.

Death itself is an intrinsic part of existence. Idealists often cannot or will not see this, but prophets are not idealists. They are truth-tellers and utter realists.

Christianity is not a purity cult that we use to prove we are superior beings, although it has certainly seemed like that during its long history. Up to now, this has made far too many Christians into unconscious hypocrites, or what Jesus calls “actors.” And I do mean unconscious; scapegoating is almost entirely an unconscious mechanism.

deep and existential self-knowledge that is almost always painfully gained. Socrates just called it “knowing thyself.”

Without undergoing a fearless moral inventory, accompanied by some divine light and love of self and the other, you just cannot see your failings or hypocrisy.

Most people, ourselves included, are very defensive in the presence of criticism.

It is always, even for prophets, an epiphany that calls forth their own “Holy, holy, holy!…Heaven and earth are full of your glory!”(Isaiah 6:3).

Only God knows if an opinion or person is genuine and true. Or, as Jesus puts it so well, “You can only tell if one is a true prophet by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).

One group’s freedom fighter may be another group’s oppressor. One group’s prophet is another group’s deceiver. One group will see fruit, and another will see poison in the same event.

Please remember that certainty—not doubt—is the opposite of faith. The insistence on certainty reveals a need for control, not a need for love or understanding.

The prophets want us to love God above all else, And be loved by God above all other partners. Which will, and must, lead to a universal love. The kind that sets out to rescue those we’d much rather condemn. That is the prophets’ hard-won conclusion, Their tear-filled victory. Is there any other kind of winning?

The Way of the Prophet

The prophet learns to be for and with, and not against.

They have perfected the art of self-criticism, and they make it their priority.

They are centered not on sin but on growth, change, and life.

They are not based in fear of God or self.

They start with judgment but end with the divine pity.

They call forth tears more than anger.

And those tears are more tears of gratitude and joy than tears of sadness for what might have been.

Richard Rohr is a globally recognized Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher whose work bears witness to the deep wisdom of Christian mysticism.