From Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation and Obedience, pp. 298ff
Much of the Bible is a
presentation of how this new community of strangers has become a powerful force
for "home-making" in the world.
These strangers now become
citizens of a new community and are given more than a new beginning. They have
been invited into and authorized for a new way in the world. They are not to
live primarily in relation to or in antagonism against the empire, but are to
transform life where they are, so that the world may become a home and other strangers
may also come to be at-home.
Four dimensions of this
home-making enterprise are noteworthy.
1. This new community of
strangers is able to dream a different dream and hope a different hope.
People who own and manage the
empire characteristically do not dream or hope. All their energy goes to
maintaining the status quo. Strangers who can remember how unbearable it was in
the imperial, excluding past can also anticipate how marvelous it will be in
time to come. Their radical hope is not wishful thinking, but confidence that
the God who initiated the transformation from outside to inside is the same God
who is at work for the complete transformation of the world.
Because of this hope, the
community refuses to absolutize the present. It trusts and knows that the present
is open and unstable, in order that God's future may appear in the midst of the
present. This community of dreamers has as a main task nurturing the dream of
how this rescuing God has promised it will be. This hope-filled Israel waits
for the transformation of the political process (Micah 4:1-4; Ezek. 34:25-31) and
the natural process (Amos 9:11-15).
There will be a time of new
covenant (Jer. 31:31-34), when all the nations shall be obedient to the
purposes of Yahweh (cf. Isa. 19:23-25). This community refuses to let present
realities negate the power of God's future.
2. This community of
strangers is able to endorse a different ethic.
This new ethic envisions a
community that includes strangers, and therefore is a bold and radical
alternative. This transformed community knows that strangers will never be at
home until there is an ethic other than the empire's, for the ethic of the
empire always produces more strangers. In the covenant, Israel embraces a
social practice that the empire
regards as subversive, treasonable, and foolish:
Do not oppress a stranger.
(Exod. 22:21-24; 23:9)
Do not exact interest from
the poor. (Exod. 22:25-27)
On the seventh day you shall
rest; that your ox and your ass may have rest, and the son of your bondmaid,
and the alien, may be refreshed. (Exod. 23:12)
When you make your neighbor a
loan of any sort, you shall not go into his house to fetch his pledge. . . . If
he is a poor man, you shall not sleep in his pledge. (Deut. 24:10-12)
You shall not oppress a hired
servant who is poor and needy. (Deut. 24:14-15)
You shall not pervert the
justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow's garment in
pledge. (Deut. 24:17)
When you reap your harvest .
. . and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it;
it shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow; that the Lord
your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. (Deut. 24:19-22)
Love the sojourner. (Deut.
10:10)
The traditions of Exodus and
Deuteronomy shape the foundational ethical presuppositions of covenanted
Israel. That foundational material and memory provided the basis for continued
critical reflection in ancient Israel, as it is preserved in the prophets.
The prophets constitute one
important way in which the distinctive claims of this community continued to be
valued and taken seriously. The prophets do not simply reiterate; they reinterpret
the old materials.
In the exilic community of
the sixth century, after the disaster of 587 B.C.E., there was a dispute in the
community of faith about inclusiveness and exclusiveness and an inclination to
draw narrow norms that would exclude all those who were not holy and righteous.
The exilic community was tempted to produce its own generation of unacceptable
outcasts. In the face of that temptation, the material of Isaiah 56—62 provides
an important alternative.
This poetic voice insists
that the community be inclusive. Two texts show how this poet continued the
tradition of radical inclusiveness, Isa. 56:4-8 and Isa. 58:6-7. Isaiah 56:4-8
concerns the inclusiveness of ritual practice. Rigorous norms would exclude
both eunuchs and foreigners from worship, but here they are included. Isaiah
58:6-7 concerns right worship, and asserts that true worship is to bring the poor
into your house, to practice social inclusiveness. This poetry remains very
close to the initial radicalness of Moses and the Sinai ethic. Israel is here
urged to be a community that transforms outcasts into members of the
household—transforms "Hebrews" into covenanted Israelites.
3. This community of
strangers is able to pray a different prayer. If one always prays in the empire
according to the modes of the empire, one learns to pray docile, passive
prayers of resignation. Indeed the empire sponsors ritual activity that takes
the dangerous edge off
worship. These strangers now
at home can still remember that they were strangers and that it was their
shrill cry that evoked new social possibilities from God. The cry reported in
Exod. 2:23-25 stands as a model for dangerous prayer that summons this
transforming God.
Thus Israel is still able to
pray with shrillness and in protest. This community is not so docile or so
reduced to conformity and despair that it accepts either the empire or the god
of the empire as an eternal given.
This community practices
hospitality, not vengeance. How peculiar it is that though this is a community
summoned away from vengeance, its prayers can still articulate hope for
vengeance directly from God.
Because Israel trusts Yahweh
so intensely and believes God's promises of justice so deeply, its prayers
impatiently demand intervention by God. In its prayer, Israel notices if God
abandons and breaks promises:
My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping
me, from the words of my groaning? (Ps. 22:1)
Israel has come out of
forsakenness and does not want to be forsaken again, especially not by Yahweh.
Israel notices if God is indifferent and does not answer:
But I, O Lord, cry to thee;
in the morning my prayer
comes before thee.
O Lord, why dost thou cast me
off?
Why dost thou hide thy face
from me?
(Psalm 88)
Israel notices if the neighbor
maltreats:
For he did not remember to show kindness [hesed],
but pursued the poor and needy
and the brokenhearted to their death. (Ps. 109:16)
Israel expects that Yahweh
will be faithful and intervene when a breakdown occurs in the home-making
process because God is careless or a neighbor is ruthless. Israel is present in
diligent ways to its own situation and experience. Israel is present, moreover,
in abrasive prayers to be sure that this God of covenant does not sell out
God's passion and become simply another lord of the empire.
The radical ethic of Israel
is matched and sustained by daring prayer. As Israel expects the world to be
transformed, so Israel insists that God must be present in transformative ways.
Israel has no patience for prayer that is not addressed against the
stranger-generating real-
ities all around.
4. This community of former
strangers, so attentive to covenant, permits and credits in its midst the abrasive
prophetic voice of criticism and possibility.
The presence of this voice of
criticism and possibility prevents Israel from becoming simply another form of the
empire, the kind at whose hands so much has been suffered. Thus Amos's abrasive
strictures and Micah's shrillness, Jeremiah's desperation and Ezekiel's oddness
keep insisting that there is for Israel, even royal Israel, an alternative way
to be in the world. The prophets relentlessly assert that reliance upon a
derelict monarchy, a sham temple religion, or
the power of cynical affluence will finally end in death.
The astonishing thing about
this assembly of former strangers is that they were never able to expel
completely the disturbing voice of the prophetic. They understood that in the
end, this voice is constitutive for a faithful community. It is this voice
which keeps open the home-making prospect that
would otherwise be terminated.
HOME-MAKING AS PUBLIC WORK
Israel's home-making
insistence, however, is not always the voice at the margin. Israel fully
believes and trusts that the very empire of estrangement can and does become a
hospitable home of covenantal justice. Justice is not to be confined to the
edges of society but finally will become the practice and policy of the system.
Israel will not let its abrasive passion be diminished. I cite four texts about
this conviction of transformation of the power of the empire (see also my
discussion of Isa. 1:21-23 in chap. 12).
1. Ezekiel 34 is a text about
the transformed political community. Verses 1-10 voice a stinging indictment of
the ruling authorities (shepherds), who have been endlessly exploitative. There
will, however, be a new intervention by God who will introduce a new public policy.
God asserts:
I myself will be the shepherd
of my sheep, and I will make them
lie down, says the Lord God.
I will seek the lost, and I will bring
back the strayed, and I will
bind up the crippled, and I will
strengthen the weak, and the
fat and the strong I will watch over;
I will feed them in justice,
(w. 15-16)
The new ordering will be
Yahweh's own administration of covenantal compassion. But then the text
continues with a more specific political intent:
And I will set up over them
one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them; he shall feed them and
be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David
shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken, (w. 23-24)
There will be a new
governance. It will be characterized by compassion and equity. God is the
guarantor of that promise, and David is the instrument of its implementation.
2. The mention of David makes
an easy transition to the New Testament and the new governance sponsored by
this heir of David “There is abundant evidence that Jesus' ministry was
addressed precisely to those who had been excluded by the empire and die laws of
holiness and righteousness. He related especially to the marginalized, who were
nullified both politically and religiously '' His first announcement
anticipates a new inclusion of the out casts:
“The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.”
Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation and Obedience
