posted October 06, 2010 04:20 PM         

To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world. Their breathless impatience with injustice may strike us as hysteria... To the prophets even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions... The prophet's words are outbursts of violent emotions. His rebuke is harsh and relentless. But if such deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?...

The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man's fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man; no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world... God is raging in the prophet's words...

"Really great works," writes Flaubert, "have a serene look. Through small openings one perceives precipices; down at the bottom there is darkness, vertigo; but above the whole soars something singularly sweet. That is the ideal of light, the smiling sun; and how calm it is, calm and strong! ... The highest and hardest thing in art seems to me to be to create a state of reverie." The very opposite applies to the words of the prophet. They suggest a disquietude sometimes amounting to agony. Yet there are interludes when on perceives an eternity of love... at bottom there is light, fascination, but above the whole soar thunder and lightning.

The prophet's use of emotional and imaginative language... marks his style as poetic. Yet it is not the sort of poetry that takes its origin, to use Wordsworth's phrase, "from emotion recollected in tranquility." Far from reflecting a state of inward harmony and poise, its style is charged with agitation, anguish, and a spirit of nonacceptance... [He] is involved with his people.. his life and soul are at stake in what he says and in what is going to happen to what he says. It is an involvement that echos on... God Himself is involved in what the words convey. Prophetic utterance is... urging, alarming, forcing us onward, as if the words gushed forth from the heart of God, seeking entrance to the heart and mind of man, carrying a summons as well as an involvement. Grandeur, not dignity, is important. The language is.. harsh and compassionate, a fusion of contradictions...

His images must not shine, they must burn. The prophet is intent on intensifying responsibility, is impatient of excuse, contemptuous of pretense and self-pity... [His] words are often slashing, even horrid -- designed to shock rather than to edify... Reading the words of the prophets is a strain on the emotions, wrenching one's conscience from the state of suspended animation...

Had a poet come to Samaria, the capital of the northern Kingdom, he would have written songs exalting its magnificent edifices, its beautiful temples and worldly monuments. But when Amos of Tekoa came to Samaria, he spoke not of the magnificence of palaces, but of moral confusion and oppression. Dismay filled the prophet:

I abhor the pride of Jacob,
And hate his palaces,

... Was Amos, then, not sensitive to beauty?

What is the highest good?...

"Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories, glory in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord Who practices kindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, says the Lord" (Jerome 9:23-24) ... "Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit..." (Zechariah 4:6)

We and the prophet have no language in common. To us the moral state of society, for all its strains and spots, seems fair and trim; to the prophet it is dreadful. So many deeds of charity are done, so much decency radiates day and night; yet to the prophet satiety of conscience is prudery and flight from responsibility. Our standards are modest; our sense of injustice tolerable, timid; our moral indignation impermanent; yet human violence is interminable, unbearable, permanent. To us life is often serene, in the prophet's eye the world reels in confusion. The prophet makes no concession to man's capacity...

Who could bear living in a state of disgust day and night? The conscience builds its confines, is subject to fatigue, longs for comfort, lulling, soothing. Yet those who are hurt, and He Who inhabits eternity, neither slumber nor sleep. The prophet is sleepless and grave. Perhaps the prophet knew more about the secret obstinacy of sheer unfairness, about the unnoticed malignancy of established patterns of indifference, than men whose knowledge depends solely on intelligence and observation...

The prophet's ear perceives the silent sigh.

In the Upanishads the physical world is devoid of value -- aunreal, a sham, an illusion, a dream -- but in the Bible the physical world is real, the creation of God... Civilization may come to an end, and the human species disappear. This world, no mere shadow of ideas in an upper sphere, is real, but not absolute; the world's reality is contingent upon compatibility with God. While others are intoxicated with the here and now, the prophet has a vision of an end.

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
To the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
All the hills moved to and fro.
I looked, and lo, there was no man;
All the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert;
All its cities were laid in ruins
Before the Lord, before His fierce anger.
(Jeremiah 4:23-26)

The prophet is human, yet he employs notes one octave too high for our ears. He experiences moments that defy our understanding. He is neither "a singing saint" nor "a moralizing poet," but an assaulter of the mind. Often his words begin to burn where conscience ends... The prophet is an iconoclast, challenging the apparently holy, revered and awesome. Beliefs cherished as certainties, institutions endowed with supreme sanctity, he exposes as scandalous pretensions...

The prophet knew that religion could distort what the Lord demanded of man, that priests themselves had committed perjury by bearing false witness, condoning violence, tolerating hatred, calling for ceremonies rather than bursting forth with wrath and indignation at cruelty, deceit, idolatry, and violence...

The prophet's message sounds incredible. In the pagan world the greatness, power, and survival of a god depended upon the greatness, power, and survival of the people, upon the city and shrine dedicated to his cult. The more triumphs the king achieved or the more countries he conquered, the greater was the god. A god who would let enemies destroy his shrine or conquer the people who worshiped him would commit suicide. A tribal god was petitioned to slay the tribe's enemies because he was conceived as the god of that tribe and not as the god of the enemies. When the Roman armies were defeated in battle, the people, indignant, did not hesitate to wreck the images of their gods.

The prophets of Israel proclaim that the enemy may be God's instrument in history. The God of Israel calls the archenemy of His people "Assyria, the rod of My anger". "Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, My servant" whom I will bring "against this land and its inhabitants". Instead of cursing the enemy, the prophets condemn their own nation.

What gave them the strength to "demythologize" precious certainties, to attack what was holy, to hurl blasphemies at priest and king, to stand up against all in the name of God? The prophets must have been shattered by some cataclysmic experience in order to be able to shatter others.

The words of the prophets are stern, sour, stinging. But behind his austerity is love and compassion for mankind. Ezekiel sets forth what all other prophets imply: "Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?" (Ezek. 18:23) Indeed, every prediction of disaster is in itself an exhortation to repentance. The prophet is sent not only to upbraid, but also to "strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees" (Isa. 35:3). Almost every prophet brings consolation, promise, and the hope of reconciliation along with censure and castigation. He begins with a message of doom' he concludes with a message of hope.

...Modern thought tends to extenuate personal responsibility. Understanding the complexity of human nature, the interrelationship of individual and society, of consciousness and the subconscious, we find it difficult to isolate the deed from those circumstances in which it was done. But new insights may obscure essential vision, and a man's conscience grow scales: excuses, pretense, self-pity... Within the limits of the human mind, relativity is true and merciful. Yet the mind's scope.. thinks of what has happened, it is unable to imagine what might have happened.

...God's kingship and man's hope were at stake in Jerusalem. God was alone in the world, unknown or discarded. The countries of the world were full of abominations, violence, falsehood. Here was one land, one people, cherished and chosen for the purpose of transforming the world. This people's failure was most serious... Prophetic accusations are perhaps more easily understood in the light of the book of Job's thesis that men might judge a human being just and pure, whom God, Who finds angels imperfect, would not.

Can mortal man be righteous before God?
Can a man be pure before his Maker?
Even in His servants He puts no trust,
His angels He charges with error;
How much more those who dwell in houses of clay,
Whose foundation is in the dust,
Who are crushed before the moth......
Behold God puts no trust in His holy ones,
The heavens are not clean in His sight;
How much less one who is abominable and corrupt,
A man who drinks iniquity like water!
(Job 4:17-19; 15:14-16)

...It is with a bitter sense of the tremendous contrast between God's righteousness and man's failure that the psalmist prays: [i]"Enter not into judgment with Thy servant; For no man living is righteous before Thee." (Psalm 143:2) Men are greatly praised when worthy of being reproved. Only a strong heart can bear bitter invectives...

Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual's crime discloses society's corruption...

To a person endowed with prophetic sight, everyone else appears blind; to a person whose ear perceives God's voice, everyone else appears deaf. No one is just; no knowing is strong enough, no trust complete enough. The prophet hates the approximate, he shuns the middle of the road. Man must live on the summit to avoid the abyss. There is nothing to hold to except God. Carried away by the challenge, the demand to straighten out man's ways, the prophet is strange, one-sided, an unbearable extremist.