Jesus and the Hebrew Prophets

 

We have touched upon the question of how the Hebrew Prophets shape our understanding of who Jesus is and how they may have shaped Jesus' self understanding. In many ways, what follows is a summation of points already made.

 

We habitually view the relationship between Jesus and the Hebrew Prophets in terms of Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy (cf. Matt 26:56).

 

Hosea 6:2 :After two days he will revivie us; on the third day he will raise us up."

Is 50:6 "I gave my back to those who struck me..."

Is 53:12 "... he poured out himself to death ... yet he bore the sin of many..."

Zechariah 9:9 "...your king comes to you.... riding on a donkey..."

et al.

 

We can also think of Jesus as standing in the tradition of the Hebrew Prophets.

 

John the Baptist's career indicates that he held a prophetic self-understanding (John 1:23; Mark 1:2 parr.; Luke 3:15 = Isa. 40:3; Mal. 3:1)

 

Jesus affirms John's prophetic identity:

 

"What did you go out to the wilderness to see?

A reed being shaken by the wind?

Then, what did you go out to see?

A man clothed in soft raiment?

Behold, men wearing soft raiment are in the houses of kings.

Why, then, did you go out? To see a prophet?

Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet!

This is he of whom it is written:

Behold, I send my messenger before your face who shall prepare your way before you."

Matt 11:7-10

 

Insofar as Jesus seems to pick up where John leaves off when John is arrested by continuing the proclamation that the Kingdom of God is at hand, Jesus inherits the prophet's mantle. But Jesus also sees this transition as a junction in history: "No one greater has arisen among men than John and the least in the reign of God is greater than he" (cf. Matt 11:11; Luke 7:28). John's baptism begins the restoration of Israel and the reign of God.

 

Prophecy in the New Covenant

 

Prophecy in the New Testament refers to either scripture (eg. Luke 24:27; John 1:45; Acts 2:3; 3:18, 24; 7:52; 8:34; 28:23; Rom 1:2; 9:29; 1 Peter 1:11; 2 Peter 3:2) or to a charismatic office in the Church (Rom 12:6; 1 Cor 12:10, 28ff.; Eph 2:20; 3:5; 4:11).

 

Just as the Hebrew scriptures eclipse the Hebrew prophets. the canonization of the New Testament eclipses Christian prophecy. In the first 1,400 years of the Church, the authority of Church doctrine, orders and confessions cannot be challenged by new revelations.

 

In Acts, the event of Pentecost seems to signify the reversal of Babel and the fulfilment of Joel 2:28; the Church becomes the prophetic community.

 

Excerpts from Walter Brueggeman "The Prophetic Word of God and History," in Interpretation July 1994 48 n. 3 pp. 239-252.

The world is attracted to two views of history

 

1) History is a process, the pieces of which we must manage as best we can to our own advantage. History is then written by the winners. Right makes might.

History is a human process.

 

2 ) The supernatural view in which very event is a direct act of God - all we do is passively read signs -- the historical process is fated.

 

The prophetic view of history, found in the Old Testament and foundational to the New Testament, views history as a human process into which God intrudes with surprise, discontinuity, gifts, judgment, newness.

God's presence, purpose and reality - God's otherness - makes inroads into the human process.

 

In Exodus, the tight birth control exercised by the Egyptians is broken by the birth of a people.

 

The Prophetic word in history is the human utterance about this God of holiness and justice -- this dangerous and subversive God . It is speech that is unimpressed by excessive religion, nonnegotiable about rhetoric, unintimidated by modernity or post-modernity, insistence that God works miracles in the historical process and is engaged in it.

 

 

The prophets, in articulating the relationship between God and the phenomenal world balance his engagement in the historical process with his transcendent role as creator.

 

The transcendence of God is extremely important for when God is over and apart, one does not suffer from distance, one become open to the possibility of relationship.

 

Abraham Heschel points out that not only may we have a relationship with God but "a prior to our relationship to Him is the fact of His relationship to us" (The Prophets, Vol 2, p. 266).

 

This is what preoccupies the prophets, commonality.

 

The prophet also hold the fundamental relationship between God and History steadily in view. What is history? It is the interrelationship of human life and more, the relationship between humanity and God.

 

Heschel concludes that the prophetic spirit does not spring from the depths of the human spirit; rather it is based upon anticipation or inclusion of humanity in God.

 

Jeremiah 1:5 "Before you were born, I knew you."

 

The task then is to sense or to discover our being known. Knowledge of who we are is not the subject I but the object me, the known.

 

 

Given that the Church is the heir to the prophetic office, what then should we do?

 

If Old Testament prophets speak against idols and false worship - the church as prophet should speak out against all that is self-serving - all self deceiving ideologies - phony absolutes - nation, race, parties, sexualities? Gender?

 

If Old testament prophets speak out against oppression, exploitation and suffering Exod 2:23-25 , so too should the church as God's prophetic voice.

 

If the Old Testament Prophets stood apart, disenfranchised and isolated from established power, as a critique of that power, so too should the Church

 

If the Old Testament prophets in identifying what was wrong with their society held up unrelenting hope, so too should the Church.

 

If the Old Testament prophets call the Israelites to a theocentric consciousness in which their relationship to God exists independently of their professions of faith and cultic activity, a relationship that defines what is justice and truth and who is blessed, the Church is called to proclaim the beatitudes.