Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks

by Walter Brueggemann

It is clear that the Jerusalem establishment appeals to the old covenantal tradition chosenness. When that tradition is drawn close to the urban reality of Jerusalem with its economic advantage and its political domination of the peasant economy round about, it is clear that the claims of dynasty and temple have come to serve as legitimation for a socio-economic, political power arrangement. It is precisely that legitimation that insists that the present power arrangement not only had divine approval, but was guaranteed to perpetuity.

We can for now leave open the question whether this “ideology” is simply a framing narrative (with Ricoeur) or whether it is a sustained act of “false consciousness” (Marx). Obviously the framers and practitioners of it do not tell us. When one moves to prophetic engagement, it becomes clear that these sustained practices of legitimation are indeed acts of false consciousness that had narcoticized its adherents to the realities of life in the world around them. Those who trusted these reassuring claims did not notice and eventually did not care. They did not need to, because their most elemental liturgical recitals told them otherwise.

The vocation of the prophets, in the face of such an enthralling ideology, is to penetrate and expose that ideology by appeal to the reality of the lived world, a reality that steadfastly refused to conform to the claims of that ideology.

It is credible to think that the prophets are not simply eruptive individual persons. They are, rather, situated in varying ways in an on-going interpretive tradition that is rooted in the old covenant of Sinai. As we have seen, however, that tradition has now been transposed into the ideology of urban Jerusalem to serve as legitimation for the power structure of the urban elites. In that context, these prophetic voices offer a perspective that has not been co-opted by or contained within the dominant ideology. We cannot know how it is that they were able to resist such domestication, but they regularly attest to their outsider status with the formula “Thus saith the Lord.” They claim to speak a word that is not derived from or informed by the dominant ideology. It will not surprise us that they claim to speak a word that refuses to accept the legitimacy of the dominant system that is broadly assumed in society. These voices, unwelcome as they were amid the dominant ideology, spoke a word of realism about the world, a realism that is grounded on the one hand in the rule of YHWH who had not been contained in the dominant ideology. They imagine a world in which YHWH is a lively character and an effective agent, the very claims that the royal-temple theology could not countenance. On the other hand, they are grounded in the socio-economic reality of the peasant production system that was in profound tension with the dominant system of consumption. The prophetic utterance char...

The dwelling of God is, on the one hand, in the heavenly place where the gods dwell; but remarkably, the divine dwelling is with the humble and lowly. Both claims fall outside the ideology of Jerusalem that gives little credit to the actuality of God and none at all to the peasants.

prophetic utterance bears witness to reality that falls outside the purview of the ideology of Jerusalem. We have seen that that ideology specializes in “steadfast love and faithfulness,” a word pair used to bespeak divine reliability for the status quo. I suggest that in the face of that usage, the best tag-word for prophetic utterance is the word pair “justice and righteousness,” a word pair that concerns economic justice and neighborly solidarity.

But of course on the lips of the prophets, the phrase “justice and righteousness” takes on a sharpness that is very different from the accommodated use of the royal-priestly liturgy. The prophetic usage intends to penetrate the facade of the ideology and to expose it as a practice that is out of sync with covenantal requirements.

The prophets expose the ideology-enthralled regime of Jerusalem as failing in covenantal, neighborly practice. In venturesome poetry, they trace out the inescapable consequences of such a neighborly default. The prophets are voices of unrelenting realism in the face of deceiving ideology. We may note two matters about their way of speaking truth to power. First, there is a consistency of form in their utterance that is called by interpreters a “speech of judgment,” utterance that imagines a formal court filing against Israel. That genre of speech includes both an indictment and a sentence. The indictment is an opportunity to review all of the covenantal failures of the power structure. It will not surprise that the indictment basically concerns two matters, the abuse of neighbors, especially vulnerable neighbors, and the dishonoring of God. And of course those two go together as violation of the two commandments, love God and love neighbor. The urban elite, they assert, have not loved God. That refusal is evident in arrogance, pride, and self-indulgence, as they imagine they are the center of the universe and are not accountable to anyone for anything. The dominant culture has, in its chosenness, failed to love neighbor and so has failed to regard the weak, poor, and vulnerable as legitimate members of the community. The elite have manipulated the markets, paid low wages, foreclosed on homes, and managed the economy in their own interest to the detriment of others. The oth...

What strikes one about the utterance of indictment and sentence (that may be uttered in many variations) is that the connection between violation and consequence is unbreakable and intransigent.9 That connection is guaranteed by YHWH as the creator and cannot be overcome by any amount of shrewd technology. The structure of creation will not yield to big power or big money or big knowledge.

The prophets in their realism attest to the ways in which God is mocked and neighbor is demeaned by political arrogance, economic manipulation, and religious obtuseness. But the second thing that strikes one about the recurring prophetic utterance of “speeches of judgment” is that they are daring, playful poetry with all kinds of risky images that are designed not only to instruct those held by the ideology, but to shock, dismay, and perhaps to move them emotionally to get back in touch with reality.

The poetry is not primarily confrontational. Rather, it is probing, and subversive, and risky, like turning a kaleidoscope so that you can see it in many different ways. Because if we see our lives in many ways, we may discover that the single way of chosenness is not a reliable certitude, but rather a distortion of reality.

Of a prophet.

The prophets call the urban establishment to recognize that social reality is populated by neighbors and occupied by YHWH, who is not a settled truth but rather a subversive agent who comes like a whirlwind or a lion or a winnowing fork. The neighbors among us wait to be treated like neighbors. The God who moves amid the poetic utterance will not be settled or domesticated or managed. Thus reality is always at risk. And how the powerful conduct themselves will determine the outcome. The acknowledgement of YHWH as the central agent will lead to well-being; but disregard of YHWH will lead to disaster and disorder. Respect for the neighbor will make for safety; but disregard of the neighbor will result in violence and dismay.

The prophets know better! They bear witness to the intransigent givens of God that are at the same time gift and trouble. Reality must be faced and not resisted. Their rhetoric is designed to break the bubble, to make contact with the facts on the ground — that God is here and neighbor is here — and to notice the links of chosenness in the present and future fates.

Prophetic realism is always juxtaposed to ideological deception. The issue is joined with courage and freedom and sometime breaks the bubble of illusion.

When we consider the convergence of these factors — race, military adventurism, monopolized wealth, unsustainable affluence, and God-given destiny — it is clear enough that this ideology, as in ancient Israel, distorted reality. In ancient Jerusalem, they could not see the facts on the ground, so busy were they with their Songs of Zion.

The prophetic task, in our contemporary society as in ancient Jerusalem, is to counter the governing ideology, in both cases that of exceptionalism. The prophetic task is to expose the distorted view of societal reality sustained by the ideology that breeds unrealistic notions of entitlement, privilege, and superiority. Prophetic work in the wake of such exposé is to advocate and enact an alternative that refuses the illusion of the ideology and that takes seriously the reality of historical existence.

The prophetic insistence is both theological and pragmatic. On the one hand, abuse of the vulnerable neighbor is an affront to God and a violation of Torah. On the other hand, in practical ways such abuse is an unsustainable policy; in the act itself there arise destructiveness and costly consequences for the body politic.

Exceptionalism imagines divine guarantees, so that one need not answer to the divine will. The resultant entitlement depends upon insensitivity to the need or even the presence of the neighbor. The disregard of both God and neighbor permits a predatory society to seem normal and acceptable.31 And because it is situated in such an ideology, that “normal” predation comes to be beyond criticism.

The task of the prophetic church, it follows, is to bear witness to the irreducible reality of God and the irreducibility of the neighbor as the reference points for a viable life in the world that even exceptionalism cannot nullify.

In a society that has become increasingly “therapeutic,” the viability of God as an ultimacy beyond our entitlements requires a kind of theological courage that is in short supply among us. But in truth the prophetic tradition has no ground on which to stand unless it can in some way attend to the holy ultimacy that lies beyond our canniest domestication.

The terms — justice, righteousness, steadfast love — all concern neighborliness, and the tone is one of urgency! So it is in prophetic witness against the ideology exceptionalism.

We should, however, pay attention to the fact that the prophets characteristically spoke poetry. They proceeded by image, metaphor, and allusion that could not be reduced to a program and that could not be co-opted by the dominant ideology. At best prophetic testimony is not didactic or instructional; it is rather a bid for emancipatory faithful imagination, in the conviction that imagining outside the ideology will evoke fresh waves of energy and courage and generative obedience.

When the ideology is one of assurance issuing in entitlement and privilege, it will not be interrupted by facts on the ground, for such facts are characteristically “inconvenient.” As a consequence, the facts on the ground must be denied in order to sustain a world view of entitlement and privilege.

The theological failure of the religious leadership consists in debilitating the character of God. In the old covenantal tradition, God was indeed an active agent with whom to reckon. But as the urban economy flourished, as the urban elites became more affluent and with it more intellectually sophisticated, such a notion of divine agency became less and less palatable, more intellectually embarrassing, and more politically inconvenient. Without ever being explicit, the wild rawness of divine agency simply disappeared into smoother liturgical formulation. Now the God who had been an agent who took initiatives became an object to be adored. Now the God who was the subject of verbs is on the receiving end of religion, made innocuous and eventually irrelevant to life. The ideology is a closed case that does not want a disruptive agent on the horizon. The God of Sinai is reformulated as the patron of Zion.

The prophetic counter to denial rooted in the ideology of exceptionalism is the practice of grief that acknowledges loss — an acknowledgement that summons the city to be fully, deeply, and knowingly engaged in its actual life experience. The urban elite, of course, do not weep. Their ideology requires that they “suck it up” and move on. But their sense of loss lingers beneath what is acknowledged; it has, however, no compelling power to transform as long as it remains unacknowledged. For that reason, the prophetic counter of grief expressed may be an antidote to denial.

That reality is that in the real world, the ideology of chosenness will not protect the city. The army will come here in devastation. The cry is because of a newly discerned risk and vulnerability, as though the entire facade of protection has dissolved. The loss is now real, embraced, and acknowledged. But even here, God is not mentioned. The immediacy of reality does not require theological commentary. It is enough to face the reality of utter loss and abandonment.

The extravagant commitment to military domination leads to a denial of the reality that the U.S. cannot for long afford to be the single surviving superpower. Our most recent wars — Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — have exhibited the limits of U.S. military capacity. Beyond that, of course, the rise of Chinese economic-military power — acknowledged by the recent redeployment of U.S. military to the Pacific — means that U.S. domination has important limits that cannot be overcome by louder exceptionalism. The over-sized Pentagon budget that is beyond criticism denies that such military capacity is limited and that economic resources to sustain it cannot be constantly expanded. The maintenance of such a budgetary commitment depends on the denial of limits.

This combination of military illusion, economic distortion, racist posturing, and skewed religion amounts to an effort to sustain a practice of denial. The purpose of the denial, I suggest, is to maintain old privilege and entitlement and to fend off the reality of the world. The practical consequence is that we have a society that in truth is not working for a large number of people.7 The “not working” is indicated by all kinds of social indices about health, education, jobs, and housing. The “not working” is helped along by the tacit appeal to violence as a way to order society, all the way from an exploitative prison system, to “Stand Your Ground” laws, to agribusiness that diminished the land for the sake of profit, to the unrestrained gun lobby, to acceptance of torture as a viable government procedure. The sum of these practices is unbearable to the body politic. But they are made “acceptable” through appeals to the ideology of exceptionalism that gives warrant for the distortion of social reality.

The prophetic task, amid a culture of denial, is to embrace, model, and practice grief, in order that the real losses in our lives can be acknowledged. The purpose of such a performance of sadness is so the things we deeply treasure among us and have lost may be fully relinquished.

This converging loss that is beyond denial, concerning loss of political-military hegemony, loss of economic dominance, loss of social-ethnic singularity, and loss of ecclesiastical prosperity, has come to amount to a loss of moral certainty and a failure of nerve about the future. In sum, we watch as the world for which we had prepared ourselves and had learned to master is disappearing before our very eyes. That loss that touches every dimension of our common life is too painful to acknowledge. It can only be talked about around the edges, because the characteristic tone of public discourse among us is, perforce, upbeat, buoyant, and optimistic. Our political leaders are required to promise a recovery and a return to normalcy. Our moral teachers are expected to “get the train back on track.” Our military leaders are expected to promise that one more “surge” of troops or one more budget expansion at the Pentagon will assure continued hegemony. Religious gurus are appreciated for offering “six steps” to a vibrant church or any other quick fix. We are, by an ideology of exceptionalism, on every front mandated to entertain a return to well-being, dominance, hegemony. For that reason every U.S. medal at the Olympics is taken as another sign of recovered greatness, and every political leader must recite the casual petition “God bless America” — God bless “America more than any other.” In such an ideological cocoon, we are scandalized by Jeremiah Wright, in his daring truth-tel...

The alternative toward health and new life is the shared, out loud, honest work of grief. Such voiced grief is an alternative to violence. Such grief, moreover, turns loss to energy for newness. Thus it is, I propose, the very voicing of loss that permitted displaced and dislocated Jews to do the work of articulating covenantal faith in quite different and venturesome categories after the loss of Jerusalem.

This, I submit, is exactly what is found in the exilic laments of Israel, the haunting, wonder, and courage to go deep into the reality of divine infidelity and disregard. In its lament Israel dares to go to the null point of despair and linger in the abyss of abandonment. In its usual practice, the church, with its unwitting preference for James’s “healthy souls,” does not want to go there. Consequently, it does not want to entertain the reality that our ancient ancestors in displacement also did not want to go. Unlike these ancient ancestors in faith, the contemporary church prefers James’s “healthy souls” who want to live bravely “without consolation.” Thus the church avoids laments.

The prophetic task, in the midst of exilic despair over destruction and displacement, is to declare and enact hope for a buoyant future that is securely in the purview of God.

The pivot of the oracle is the term “wait,” that is, hope, the refusal to accept or conform to the closed world of imperial reduction. The utterance mediates a transformed reality that the empire-induced despair had nullified.

As long as the displaced are preoccupied with the palpable causes of despair — the city in shambles, the hegemony of the empire — the utterance of promise is not credible. It is not more than wishful thinking.

What God said and what God will say is always quite different from what we can and must say to ourselves and others about its content. . . . the Word of God as directed to us is a Word which we do not say to ourselves and which we could not in any circumstances say to ourselves. . . . The Word of God always tells us something fresh that we had never heard before from anyone.

And of course, such nostalgia that wants to pretend against the reality of urban life that is peopled with others unlike us is an immense temptation of religious life. The construction of “Whole Life Centers” by “successful” churches constitutes a beguiling attempt to live in a safe, protected, homogeneous community of the like-minded, while fencing out frightening otherness.

In the midst of near-despair, the prophetic task is to articulate hope, the prospect of fresh historical possibility assured by God’s good governance of the future.

From this analysis I suggest that the prophetic task now, in contemporary U.S. society, is exactly to perform hope that is characteristically a tenacious act of imagination, grounded in a dream, song, narrative, or oracle, rooted in the elusive but faithful authority of God.

When we consider an evangelical alternative to these totalizing claims, a beginning point is the recognition that the imperial narrative is not an ontological given. It is, rather, from the ground up a carefully constructed, frequently reiterated narrative that is in the service of the pyramid managers. When it is seen as a construct, it follows that our social experience is then open to an alternative construction. But this narrative is the one we inhale on a regular basis, a narrative that is committed to greed, accumulation, and violence that pertains equally to liberals and conservatives. That narrative, moreover, is wrapped in the loud claims of exceptionalism that becomes the air we breathe, surely at great cost to our personal health and to our public possibilities.

We are bound to acknowledge, in expositing this alternative narrative, that it, like the imperial narrative, is not an ontological given. The baptismal narrative that evokes and legitimates neighborly community is also a social construction, a proposal, an advocacy, a possibility that depends upon and assures the conviction that the narrative of empire has no prior claim upon us. Thus this alternative narrative joins issue with the imperial narrative. It is not an even contest or a level playing field. The imperial narrative has many advantages at the outset, not least that we are all to some extent in thrall to that narrative. But the issue is joined!

When we derive our vocabulary from the Scriptures, from the loaf and the cup, we find ourselves entrusted with a way of talk about brother and sister and sacrament and hope and obedience and resistance — all terms that make no sense in the empire, for such claims cannot be accommodated to the goals of empire.

But of course the prophetic tradition — rooted in the old covenant — knows that the defining requirements of a society are not technical and do not admit of technical resolution. Because the covenantal-prophetic tradition is grounded in relational reality, it knows that what is required for the happiness and safety of the body politic is what is required in the old covenantal habits of justice, righteousness, and steadfast love.

Thus says the Lord: Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord. (Jeremiah 9:23-24)

Thus it is the church that practices realism in the face of ideology vouching for “God and country” and all that the mantra signifies. The realism of the church is grounded in nothing less than the “embodiment” of the life-giving God in Jesus Christ and in the derivative practice of the Eucharist, whereby we refuse the denial of the bodily world that lives by bread.

Thus it is the church that practices and performs grief while the world conventionally denies the power of death among us. It is the church — after the manner of covenantal Israel — that has practiced the honesty of mourning that is essential for continuing to live freely in a world of profound loss.

Thus it is the church that performs hope in a world of despair. The church regularly performs the rhetoric and gestures of forgiveness with the prospect of beginning again in newness.

We may and do quibble about many matters in the church. But however we may parse those quibbles, we share this confession of newness, given in ways we know not how, at the bottomless pit of death. And we begin again! Thus the prophetic tasks of realism, grief, and hope are not odd interpretations or incidental add-ons to the life of the church. They are, rather, the most elemental truth that belongs to the identity and life of the church. These acts of realism, grief, and hope are everywhere present in the life, the talk, and walk of the church.