This poem features extravagant language about a coming time of loss, disaster, distress and suffering. It is commonly dated to the time before Jerusalem was destroyed by the invading Babylonian empire. While the daring poets whom we call "prophets" could discern the coming danger to the city, most of their contemporaries, ensconced in ideologies of self-regard, did not notice the danger. They simply assumed that as God's chosen people, all would be well. That situation sounds very much like our own. The most discerning among us, often given to poetic extravagance, can see the coming trouble, if not from environmental abuse then from unsustainable economic self-indulgence. At the same time many folk, trusting in old assurances of well-being, assume all will be as it was. They are simply impervious to the real threats that poetic discernment articulates.
It is no wonder in such a circumstance of wholesale denial, that the poet must resort to vigorous, hyperbolic (?), searing rhetoric. This rhetoric is not prediction. It is rather an extremity of emotive speech designed to penetrate denial with the hope of evoking response that takes seriously the non-negotiable holy purposes of God.
The first person utterance of God, given us by the poet, portrays an attentive holiness that is offended by the obdurate self-indulgence of the populace. Indeed, that obdurate populace has banished God from its life. That does not mean they have given up on religious talk and religious gesture. Rather they have decided, in quite practical ways, that God is no real agent in the life of the world. The old superstitions about God have been rejected and God, while worshipped, is seen as an irrelevant. God cannot do good and cannot do evil, does not punish and does not reward, and so can be safely disregarded.
In our time we, like those ancients, have found God to be an irrelevance to the life of the world. The so-called "new atheists" only bring to speech what is commonly unspoken but tacitly accepted. In a world of Enlightenment rationality where human knowledge is transposed into ultimate control, God is surely an irrelevance. Consequently we are free to do what we want and must do what we can to secure ourselves.
And then the poet moves against such a conclusion, against ancient practicality and against modern rationality. The prophetic claim is a rhetorical one. The offer is a poetic one. The effort is to imagine alternatively, to conjure a world that is not itself ultimate, but that finally must give account of itself. Such a claim given in cold logic is not easy to make. But such a claim, given in shrill poetry, invites us to imagine that soon or late we must give answer for obdurate self-regard.
The poetic response to the elimination of God as a real player in the world is that God will have "a day." God will have a time of intrusive self-assertion. There is among us a lot of craziness about such a time in biblical interpretation, and we get ludicrous time-tables and speculative imagery. But this poetry is none of that. It is simply an insistence that answering for life in the world is ultimately inescapable, because the world is not self-contained. It is finally at the behest of a mystery beyond us that we cannot control or manage. The poet, moreover, knows the name of that mystery who has been known in the long memory of Israel, who does not now propose to be absent from the public process of world history.
As a result we get poetry that pounds at our ears: "the day, that day, a day, day, day day...!" There is a time, surely to come, when life bursts out beyond our control and our management in ways that threaten and undo us. It was not difficult for that old poet to imagine such at time in the future of Jerusalem when the holy city would be under savage assault; it surely felt in prospect like the end of the world! Mutatis mutandis, it is not difficult to utter such poetry of extremity in our time in the wake of 9/11, in the midst of the environmental crisis, when the economy is in free fall, and when the world as we have known it evaporates before our very eyes. The poet wants his listeners to sense at some deep emotive level that the future of the world is beyond our confident control. There will be ample time later to talk about the good future that God will give beyond the disaster, as in 3:16-20. But not now! Now there is only time for candor about the free fall in which the faithful affirm that the Holy One is present, albeit only in poetic imagination.
What a time is coming on our obdurate society! What a season it will be when our control turns feeble. What a day it will be when we see the limit and failure of our anxious knowledge and our technology and our hardware and our imagination. It will be a time that feels like a cosmic assault. It will be a time that sounds like death and darkness and gloom and wrath and distress. (The reader may add other terms that come to mind, as long as they are uncompromisingly negative!) One does not need to be superstitious or primitive or even religious to imagine that we face "A Day of Reckoning." The economic issue that runs from Greece directly to my pension plan is a drama that arises from obdurate self-indulgence on the part of some. As the old poet would have anticipated, we learn that there is no way to outflank that Day or secure a "pass" on it. The poet could perchance "foresee" what even we must now face.
The Mystery will -- soon or late -- envelop our self-confident control that has been greedy and self-serving. And comes then the uneasy, unsettling awareness that our tools for control are futile in the big picture, no help from money, no help from knowledge and no help from arms -- no help! No help at all!
Of course such hyperbolic rhetoric might be wrong. Maybe our control will prevail. Maybe our mastery will continue to perpetuity. Maybe all will be well and all manner of things will be well. Maybe we will dwell in perpetual shalom. Maybe. But we may doubt that as the poet doubts that. And you, dear reader, may doubt with the poet. We do not know the day or the hour; of course not. We only know that we are called to sober awareness. The hidden mystery of life is well beyond our little systems and will not be mocked.
Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be.
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
--Tennyson
Editor's Note: ON Scripture is a series of Christian scripture commentaries produced in collaboration with Odyssey Networks. Each week pastors from around the country will approach the lectionary text of the week through the lens of current events, providing a religious voice that is both pastoral and prophetic.
Walter Brueggemann: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24: Failed Kings and the Good Shepherd
ON Scripture | Odyssey Networks
Worldwide governmental systems, inefficient at best, dangerous at worst. Even most religious systems, bickering, squabbling masses, taking it upon themselves to be spokesmen for God, not by an honest, unbiased understanding and explaining scripture, which is their only job, but by their deep involvement with politics and governments. Some even thinking themselves God's executioner of justice. (John 16:2- "the hour is coming when everyone that kills you will imagine he has rendered a sacred service to God").
And the economic systems- greed, corruption and mismanagement, bringing forth the swarms of humanity who have taken a stand and have said enough. All these systems doomed to failure. Also, as you brought out, God's day is near and there is a hurrying very much to it. Zephaniah 1:12-many saying God is impotent and won't do good or bad. Many quickly dismissing Him, jumping on the bandwagon of higher critics, sneering at God's word, putting there own intellect and power, scanty as it is, above the One who is all knowing. Yes, the day, the day, the day, as you say. Or-- enough, enough, enough. God's day is here. Prophecy has dual fulfillment. People don't want to think of judgement, but if they don't they get swept into it unawares.
and empires go, and ours will be included. But it won't have anything to do with God,
who by the way has gone missing for quite some time now. We should all spend more
time caring for each other, and not worry about some Celestial Dictator.
The Christians who left after the first invasion were the ones who were spared. These had recognized the signs Christ gave them and acted upon it.(Matthew 24:15-22). That was a great tribulation that occurred to that people, but the greatest (in size and scope) tribulation is the one we are on the brink of. In our day, it is not just an empire that will be affected, but the entire inhabited earth.
Because of the inventions of man, the communication is at an unprescendented level. 3G is not good enough and neither is 4G, we have 4S and more coming. We are aware of things practically as they happen now. The world economy is intricately, delicately connected and like a house of cards, can fall and destroy the whole structure. The eco system is being destroyed, resulting in the balance of things being thrown off course. Earhquakes, floods, hurricanes etc. are the results of mankind's devastation of the planet.
Dear Mr. Brueggeman, your above stated categorical statement, relating Greece to your and other people’s money “drama†problems, requires at least a clear explanation from you.
Because, using out of ages long historical habit, Greece and Greeks as “Agricola –agreeco†scape goats, has no place on today’s matter of fact instant internet reality.
I know for sure that, the Greek civilization is the only one whose esoteric process, brought scientific meaning to the divine and thus “palpability†to man’s divine potential.
In the reality of life, even “pension plan†pocketbook contents, are best used to bring forth the “actuality†of one’s own everlasting Blooming.
Dear Mr. Brueggeman, your above stated categorical statement, relating Greece to your and other people’s money “drama†problems, requires at least a clear explanation from you.
Because, using out of long ages historical habit, Greece and Greeks as “Agricola –agreeco†scape goats, has no place on today’s matter of fact instant internet reality.
I know for sure that, the Greek civilization is the only one whose esoteric process, brought scientific meaning to the divine and thus “palpability†to man’s divine potential.
In the reality of life, even “pension plan†pocketbook contents, are best used to bring forth the “actuality†of one’s own everlasting Blooming.
The Hebrew word for prophet is "Nevi" and it literally means to "spew forth" in the great sense as releasing a burden, because the prophet directly experienced the immediate emotions of God Himself, as if they were his own.
And then using the language of those who were his contemporaries expressing those emotions into words and often, in this highly exalted spiritual state, in poetic hyperbole.
But a prophet can be distinguished from a Christians believer speaking "a word of knowledge" by the Holy Spirit, because he speaks "the Word of God", and thus he would never serve as spokesman for a Christian leader or denomination, and likely would not be received by any denomination, because 50 % of the prophet's work is rebuke.
Are there prophets today?
if there were more than a half dozen on the whole earth, I would be extremely surprized, for Prophets are so exceedingly rare, they must travel.
were just going on about their lives, making war, making peace, struggling to
survive. Why complicate it with things that don't make a lick of sense? There were/are a lot of cultures that have done just fine, thank you, without any of this
"knowledge".
Please... spare me, do you actually beleive in that? seriously.
If there is a god (and there isnt) then HE alone created the devil and he alone has the power to stop him. Now either he can't stop the devil or he cant be bothered to which in that case then he's just as much to blame.
I had spent more than 30 years on the Book of Revelations before it dawned on me, it bears from one end to the other, the character of a Hebrew prophecy, that's when I began to see that the Church is NOT the sujbect of Revelations.But Israel is.
Where is the Church? She's is seen there as "The Great Harlot". only a married wife can be called a harlot in Scripture.And this woman who was married to Christ.
She has been captured by the "Northern Army" and her intent is to build a worldly kingdom, but without the King.
This could be why the doctrinally predominant Kingdom Now!/Dominionist Evangelical Christians majority have gotten into bed in an illicit "marriage" with GOP'ers. But, in doing so, they had to give up God's power and grace in exchange for secular power, and without that power they can have no worldly Kingdom. The very kingdom which Jesus Himself is coming soon to destroy!!
Before you were able to project yet another (your own) wacky interpretation of it?
re-assure yourselves, that there are others who think as you do.
Stop having such silly beliefs.
♪♪ here he comes, parting the clouds above ♪♪
♪♪ oh, here comes the lord ♪♪
♪♪ toot your birdie horns ♪♪
♪♪ then upon his finger perch ♪♪
♪♪ he may come here to stay just to watch us pray in his favorite church ♪♪
Just as I've picture him -
http://video.adultswim.com/promos/moral-orel-here-he-comes.html
hey PGC, nice ta see ya, as they say old friend,
my first glance at the link was Oral, ahem, as in Oral Roberts, till I clicked on it
what brings ya over to the cesspool side, I did see that this article made the main page under religion
Harold Camping is no longer around to pick on, the Republican Presidential candidates seem to be ready to fill the vacancy
:-)
to the character traits and attitude Jesus taught. Love, kindness,
tolerance, honesty, patience, compassion, empathy etc.?
Robert Oppenheimer after the first nuclear explosion, quoting Shiva, "I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds..."
Shiva is Lord of the Dance and when the Dance ends...so do we.