Tears of Things

Prophetic wisdom for an age of outrage, by Richard Rohr (a summary by Pat Evert)

Introduction – Good Trouble

The prophets introduced a completely novel role into ancient religion: an officially licensed critic, a devil’s advocate who names and exposes their own group’s shadow side! They encourage what I call “holy disorder,” we grow with God or we regress due to our inability to love and trust what is happening. From these disruptions, a new order arises (what I call “reorder”). The process of allowing and creating holy disorder is surely what Representative John Lewis called getting into “good trouble.” For them, good trouble could draw forth better things—an entirely different consciousness. Why has critical thinking always had to come from outside our religious systems and hardly been allowed from within? This is a major problem. Waking up is often devastatingly simple. It all comes down to overcoming your separateness and any need to protect it. For the untransformed self, religion is the most dangerous temptation of all. Our egos, when they are validated by religion, are given full permission to enslave, segregate, demean, defraud, and inflate—because all bases are covered with pre-ascribed virtue and a supposed hatred of evil. They move from that anger and judgmentalism to a reordered awareness in which they become more like God: more patient like God, more forgiving, more loving like God. “No one else is your problem,” says the prophet. “You are your own problem. The Christian religion has sought to achieve its own innocence rather than act in solidarity with suffering and sinners. They call out the collective, not just the individual, assuring us that some common good might just be possible.

God is still in the very slow process of disenchanting us out of our love of winning and succeeding. The slow metamorphosis of our notions of God—from lion to lamb, from anger to tears, from lonely solitude to grateful community—is quietly taking place. Humanity is indeed growing up. I am calling this surprising letting down of defenses—the prophetic “way of tears.” It is a movement, frankly, from the Ten Commandments to the eight beatitudes. A movement that the prophets illustrated for us twenty-five hundred years ago, and that we need—out of desire and desperation—to recover today.

The Tears of Things

“There are tears at the heart of things”—at the heart of our human experience. Only tears can move us beyond our deserved and paralyzing anger at evil, death, and injustice without losing the deep legitimacy of that anger. We begin in a state of empathy with and for things and people and events, which just might be the opposite of judgmentalism. It is hard to be on the attack when you are weeping. The sympathy that wells up when we weep can be life-changing, too, drawing us out of ourselves and into communion with those around us. Life disappoints and hurts all of us, and the majority of people, particularly men, do not know how to react—except as a child does, with anger and rage. If we stay with our rage and resentment too long, we will righteously and unthinkingly pass on the hurt in ever new directions, and we injure our own souls in ways we don’t even recognize. Even Jesus, our enlightened one, “sobbed” over the whole city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41) and at the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). In his final “sadness…and great distress” in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:37, JB), “his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood” (Luke 22:44, JB). It feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect, or as I first wanted or needed it to be. This is true of Christianity, the United States, politics in general, and most of all myself. Remember, if you do not transform your pain and egoic anger, you will always transmit it in another form. All things cry for forgiveness in their imperfection, their woundedness, their constant movement toward death. Mere rage or resentment will not change any of these realities. Tears often will, though.

The prophets are trying to warn us against the suffering that our own collective behavior is bringing upon us. A heart of stone cannot recognize the empires it builds and the empires it worships. Lamentation does. It moves us through anger and sadness. As we are slowly discovering with wildfires, a healthy forest needs to have its overgrowth and undergrowth cleared out, to prevent a more destructive future blaze. This is the more common way the metaphor of fire is used in the Bible—not as an element of torture, but as a purifying force. Truth without love is not transformational truth. It seems to be a journey of refining the real message, fire by fire, until we reach a final state of joy and hopefulness. This is the clear trajectory of human life. All of us, prophets included, usually must do it wrong, or partly wrong, many times before we can do it right. It cannot be any different, as a good parent knows. In the book of Habakkuk you must endure three full chapters of the prophet’s railing and raging until you get to the final three verses, where you can join him in exulting and dancing: “with hind’s feet on the high places.” Frankly, I think you could describe every one of the prophets eventually yelling “Nevertheless!” after all their raging and convicting. Paul says it better: “For we know imperfectly, and we prophesy imperfectly, and only when perfection comes will the imperfect come to an end” (1 Corinthians 13:9–10, emphasis mine). Teachers and prophets change and grow up, learning by their own mistakes, as Paul famously did himself.

If you read them closely, you will begin to see a pattern I have long taught about the way we progress as human beings: from order into what seems to be disorder, and finally reaching some kind of reorder. Those who love order need to be humbled by the experience of holy disorder. Those working through disorder need the insight of reorder. Without this growth process, we have so much immature religion. Unless we learn how to study the prophets as a rite of passage into adult religion, I do not think their writings and insights will be of much use. Jesus gave us a rather clear code for authenticity: “By their fruits you will know them.” “Blessed are those who weep,” Jesus says in Matthew’s gospel (5:4). Yet we can never mandate tears; we can only allow them, encourage them, and join with them as they soften our soul.

Amos: Messenger to the Collective

The prophet Amos lived in the eighth century b.c. in a small town in Judah called Tekoa. There he scratched out a living as a herdsman and a pruner of trees. God called Amos during the reign of Jeroboam II (786–746 b.c.), at the height of Israel’s greatest territorial expansion and prosperity. This was how we arrived, sometimes for a span of centuries, at self-interested interpretations that allowed us to justify prejudice, slavery, exorbitant wealth, and whatever else we preferred. When we lose the bias toward the bottom, it’s often because we never got on the biblical trajectory to begin with. Amos, like other prophets, does not stay forever in his initial anger and threat of punishment. Instead, he transforms his anger into generative, creative energy.

The prophet’s judgments are clearly directed at the group, the culture, the collective. Amos knew that most collectives are content to locate evil among individuals. But there is little value in placing our attention merely on a handful of bad actors. Culture and systems are what create the large-scale evils that threaten us—such as poverty, war, and ecological devastation. Though Jesus healed individuals, he simultaneously critiqued the systems that made them need healing. When you ask why the healing was needed, you have a whole new way of seeing what needs to change, which is invariably the bigger power structure. Consider some of the contradictions in our own culture:

Killing is wrong, but war is good.
Greed is wrong, but luxury and capitalism are ideals to be sought after.
Pride is bad, but nationalism and patriotism are admirable (never in the Bible).
Lust is wrong, but flirting and seduction are attractive.
Envy is a capital sin, but advertising is our way of life.
Anger at our neighbor is wrong, but angry people get their way.
Sloth is a sin, but wealthy people can take it easy.
Murder is wrong, but easy access to guns is a right and duty.

The view from the bottom helps us escape this human tendency. My point here is that the prophets approached evil from an entirely different perspective. They attacked hidden cultural assumptions more than they did the people caught up in them. Taking responsibility for the common good is the more important moral mandate. And that is exactly where the prophets began. When the common good is the focus, preaching is not about imposing guilt and shame on individuals, but about giving vision and encouragement to society. Harping about individual sin and criminal convictions might shame a few individuals into halfhearted obedience, but in terms of societal change it has been a notorious Christian failure. So what is Amos’s positive vision? “Harvest will follow directly after plowing, the treading of grapes immediately after sowing, when the mountains will run with new wine and the hills will flow with it.” (Amos 9;13-15). There is so much earth-based positivity, human joy, and consciousness of God’s love in these statements. Radical unity with God and neighbor is the only way any of us truly heals or improves. Amos is inaugurating a revolution in our understanding of how divine love operates among us. This is no longer retribution or punishment, but a full reordering. It is such divine extravagance.

A Critical Mass: The Secret of the Remnant

The whole group never gets the message, but a smaller group (the “remnant”) carries the love and hope of restoration forward after each purification (that is, after the trials and tribulations the people endure). The truth will always be too much for everybody, but God seems content with a few getting the point in each era. When we respect the loved and rejected outsider, the “little ones” become the indication that we are on a tangent of divine love. Those who are often called the “chosen” or the “elect” are chosen not because of God’s actual favoritism toward them, but because of their radical trust in God’s universal, non-punitive, and unconditional love for them. God is saving all of history and all of humanity, but only with the direct, conscious help of a faithful few. The critical mass in biblical theology is always the small, “edgy” group that carries history forward almost in spite of the whole. Think of Noah and his family in the ark; the youngest and forgotten son David becoming king; the barren wives Sarah and Elizabeth, each giving birth to a special child late in life; the twelve outlier fishermen being called as Jesus’s disciples instead of anybody from the capital city temple team.

Those in the remnant carry the mostly hidden truth forward despite—or probably because of—their rejected or marginal status. “The poor” live with a double indemnity. They are blamed not only for their own personal failings but also in many cases for the larger group’s problems and sins. It’s not by universal reward-punishment logic. But for the prophets and their students, God’s unconditional love is the hallmark, the ideal, and the model for all human behavior—reaching its epitome in the teaching of Jesus.

They have met the infinite mercy and stopped counting, measuring, and weighing themselves and others. They know these acts are meaningless. The rest of us keep trying to compute and settle for polite civil religion instead of presencing and participating in what is always immeasurable. In the presence of divine love, your cautions and warnings all fall away as unnecessary and unhelpful. Hosea is the first prophet to clearly move the tradition from law to heart, from the parent-child dynamic, to spousal intimacy. This is admittedly a crude metaphor for the contemporary mind, but note that it quite precisely names that the male organ of symbolic force and dominance is what needs to suffer some radical surgery. Throughout the prophets, a circumcised foreskin was expanded to a circumcised heart. A minority within a minority, they taught the refined and actual message of love of God and neighbor as one, which is full religious transformation.

Welcoming Holy Disorder: How the Prophets Carry Us Through

When personal or historical disorder shows itself—and it always does—we will begin a necessary period of critique, change, or rebellion. I am calling this disorder the “prophetic rule.” Few cultures have had training for these crucial dissenters, apart from the Jewish people. If such internal, legitimated critics are not allowed, let alone encouraged and trained, history will only move forward at the cost of blood and heartbreak. Growth will not be organic or inclusive; instead, it will be largely exclusionary and punishing of whatever is in that moment considered the problem. I founded the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) to be truth-tellers who are inside and effective critics of religious institutions, without becoming negative or cynical themselves—a loyal opposition, as we call it today. The CAC’s message became a balancing act between action and contemplation—forming contemplative activists and engaged contemplatives. Prophets, as we have seen, occupy an entirely different role from priests and ministers. Instead of truth-telling, priests are more concerned with maintaining order and orthodoxy within the group. True prophets will guide us into, hold us inside of, and then pull us through to the other side of what will always seem like disorder. The more you have bought into any kind of absolute and necessary order, the bigger a dose of disorder you will need. It is in and through such conflicts that we come to third-way thinking and acting, moving beyond the argumentative dualistic mind to the creative contemplative mind where our ego is not steering the ship.

They can still love and respect those who have a different opinion.
They do not need to be right, first, or best.
True prophets will pursue some knowledge of theology and Scripture, for the sake of good initial boundaries, concerning themselves with right practice more than right belief.
They have a capacity for some degree of objective thinking beyond their own agenda, ego, and grievances.
They are team players and not just lone rangers. They are loyal to at least a couple of communities.
The issue they are confronting is really the issue,
They have purified motivations
They manifest the classic “fruits of the Spirit,”

Most of the prophets surely made mistakes before their message could be refined or even heard, as we see in their unhelpful rage and dualistic judgments. A major assertion in this whole book is that they were angry, even depressed, before they were sad and enlightened. When you want and need something extra, like fame, money, or notoriety, the truth is already lost. Jesus is forever purifying his messengers by pulling them outside of the usual reward systems. Prophecy is the least licensed and rewarded of any of the charisms or ministries. In fact, it is more likely that a prophet will experience persecution and misunderstanding, rather than perks or career advancement. To be used as a prophet or to follow a prophet’s lead should profit you nothing! Otherwise the role and the message are corrupted. They embody and teach shared knowing with God by not claiming their thoughts as their own, as hard as that is to say! A prophet does not need to push the river of her ideas too feverishly, because she knows the source of the river is beyond her. Prophetic speech is never arbitrary or just interesting. It is always necessary speech—the truth that no one is asking for, or even expecting, but that desperately needs to be said for the field to be widened and deepened. Prophetic speech comes from a different level of consciousness. The prophet’s goal, then, is always to create an alternative world based in Spirit and not in mammon. Prophets seldom preach peace and prosperity. If we allow it to do its work on us, this prophetic disruption can open up our accepted sense of what’s possible, making room for evolving people, for exceptions to our normal ways of doing things, and for something genuinely new to happen. Remember, every time God forgives sin, he is saying that relationship matters more than his own rules. Prophets keep the priestly systems “good” and honest by starting with a sincere inner life of contemplation and a gradual purification of motive. We need both priests and prophets. We need order and then critique of that order, and then further resolution, which I call reorder. Every institution needs designated, positive, and affirmed whistleblowers, or the shadow always takes over and the problem is never included in the resolution. Effective insider critics, licensed and beloved critics are what we need! Reformers from without are too easy to dismiss and easy to exclude. Someone must be trained and blessed for the prophetic role of official devil’s advocate from inside the community. Then they no longer work for the “devil” but for the angels of light—and cannot easily be dismissed. Then holy disorder can bear fruit and become a new source of an order founded on God’s love for everyone. No exceptions.

Jeremiah: The Patterns that Carry Us Across

Jeremiah lived the prophetic pattern fully and is rightly thought of as a forerunner to Jesus. He began in anger, as all prophets do, but he did not stay there, moving into lamentation and slowly tiptoeing into praise. God does not, as Jeremiah and Jesus preached, desire to be worshipped, or we have a very needy and co-dependent God. True worship’s function is to radically decenter our naturally imperial ego, but too often it devolves into some notion of needed sacrifice, as it did for the ancient Israelites. We drift back into an instrumental religion of necessary payments, deserved rewards, laws, and prescribed liturgies. Authentic Christianity must be an utter commitment to reality, as opposed to ritual, or it is not a commitment to God. The entire covenant between Israel and Yahweh is stated in collective language: “I will give them a heart to acknowledge that I am Yahweh. They shall be my people, and I will be their God” (Jeremiah 24:7, emphasis mine). This is the lasting formula throughout Jeremiah, and indeed the whole Old Testament. The punishments the prophets promised were overwhelmingly in this world (famine, drought, plague, war, etc.), not the personal hell that emerged later in Christian mythology. The Bible’s continuous storyline is that the joys and disappointments of the visible world are revelations of a less visible one. The less visible one is in control and is ultimately benevolent. Faith is our attempt to recognize and trust such benevolence. As we evolve gradually toward a capacity for unconditional love and gratuitous forgiveness (just as we do in any lasting friendship or marriage), a huge break must be made in our typical emotional and religious logic. The prophets call our obsession with winning the “mind of empire” and obsessively warn Israel against going there. We can recognize this new order (reorder) when it is less violent and more universal than the previous arrangement. Jeremiah leaps toward such a reorder by introducing the unthinkable idea of a whole new covenant (31:31–34) to replace the old one. Jeremiah has successfully walked us through the trauma of exile, all the while breaking the logic of vengeance and privilege that we normally use to interpret such events. Instead of seeing punishment or “winning” as the endpoint of the people’s story, he proclaims that Yahweh loves Israel even more when they sin: “I have loved you with an everlasting love, so I am constant in my affection for you” (Jeremiah 31:3, JB). I will hasten their recovery and their cure, …I will let them know peace and security in full measure, I will restore the fortunes of both Judah and Jerusalem, and build them again as they were before, I will cleanse them of every sin they have committed against me… all these I will forgive, and Jerusalem shall be my joy, my honor, and my boast, before all the nations of the earth. (Jeremiah 33:6–9, JB) Where did Jeremiah get the freedom and courage to talk this way? Only God could have provoked such generosity. Let’s just move entirely beyond any notion of retribution or punishment, he joyously promises, as the frame for how God’s justice is done! This is so hard to conceive of that most of us are still not there twenty-five hundred years after Jeremiah. Sincerely religious people, trained in forgiveness, exodus, exile, and crucifixion, should be the readiest and most prepared for this full journey, but up until now that has only been the case in a small remnant of every group. The new one that emerged in Jeremiah’s time was unilateral from Yahweh’s side: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33, NRSV). This dramatic change replaces the earlier order by surpassing it, not destroying it. Further, humanity’s obedience is no longer to be associated with laws and external behavior. As Ezekiel says, “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). It is an utterly honest recognition that I am not the primary “doer” in the world of love. It is being done unto me. Our whole life, for Paul, is “in Christ,” a life of full divine participation with and in the other. They are Jeremian-Jesus people, who started in the old covenant and are morphing into the new, as so many of us do in the “second half of life.” Fear is less their motive now, and love is creeping in at all levels, almost unbeknown to themselves.

Unfinished Prophets: Elijah, Jonah and John the Baptizer

What I call “unfinished prophets” don’t evolve and mature but persist in anger, blaming, and accusations. They remain moralistic and judgmental. One of these unfinished prophets—John the Baptizer—may surprise you. John the Baptizer is often seen as the successor of Elijah, another unfinished prophet we’ll consider in this chapter. Elijah was a dramatic and violent messenger heralding the day of God’s judgment. My conclusion is that John and Elijah grew up just like all the rest of the prophets; we just aren’t permitted to see all of the stages in the text. These two prophets—along with Jonah, as we’ll see—clearly fall short of the reign of God, and yet they still do some of God’s work. This is reminiscent of Paul’s reference to himself and his fellow Jesus followers as “earthenware jars,” a comparison he strikes “to make it clear that such an overwhelming power comes from God and not from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7 JB).

Elijah: Stuck in Spectacle – Elijah (c. 875 b.c.) never wrote anything but is presented in 1 Kings as a violent, dualistic man. The Baal prophets appeal unsuccessfully for their god to kindle the wood on their altar, but Yahweh answers Elijah’s prayers by starting a fire on his altar. Elijah tells the Israelites, “Seize the prophets of Baal: do not let one of them escape” (1 Kings 18:40). He then slaughters them. Prophets who continue to lead (or end) with their rage have only half of the message, it seems. They have the anger but lack the compassion; mere moral positioning and ethical “answers” are not really the work of conversion. In our times, it is common to confuse articulate passion with prophecy when it is often simply untransformed anger that will not change anything in the long term. A true prophet leaves the success of the message in God’s hands.

Jonah: Stuck in Reward-Punishment – Jonah, rejects his divine commission at first, refusing to preach God’s mercy to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria and Israel’s ancient enemy. The people repent upon hearing his message and thus are saved from God’s wrath. But Jonah complains, angry because the Lord spared them. He is so detached from his own real message that he is disappointed when it succeeds! His problem is that he cannot move beyond a dualistic reward-punishment worldview. Jonah thinks only Israel deserves mercy. The story of Jonah breaks all the expectations of who is right, and then remakes those expectations in favor of grace. It is a brilliant morality play, not a piece of dogmatic theology. He wanted them to be wrong so that he could be right, yet in his anger at Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire. In fact, he even resented their joining his “belief club.” Jonah, who thinks that he and his religion are on top, is undone by “the pagans” in Nineveh. We call this a “power reversal story.” As Jesus later points out, the Ninevites repent of their evil ways, while Israel did not (Matthew 12:41–42). The supposedly unconverted show themselves to be converted, while Jonah is shown to be unchanged, despite his three days in darkness. These are the concerns of a spiritually discerning person that help us sense and recognize the difference between a mere zealot and the much purer motivations and final goals of one who is doing God’s work and not just their own.

John the Baptizer – John still had to get rid of his head before he could see from his heart. He enjoyed being a superior and judgmental outsider far too much. The ego hides itself too well, and too easily, by making judgments. It’s a good disguise. The judger always has a leg up on the judged, even if his judgment is wrong. He is portrayed as an ascetic and a firm moralist, preoccupied with purity and others’ sins. He calls others a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7), no better than rocks, and seems rather gleeful when he threatens them with “a fire that will never go out” (Matthew 3:12, JB). He does not yet know the language of healing, forgiveness, and grace that we find in Jesus and the mature prophets. He publicly denounces Herod for marrying his niece, the wife of his late brother, and gets his head chopped off for his troubles (Matthew 14:3–12). This makes him a martyr, but only for a purity code and not for the new kingdom or indwelling spirit that Jesus proclaims. We do Scripture, and ourselves, a disservice if we take such unfinished prophets as examples to blindly follow, instead of recognizing their complexities and what they reveal about the much deeper role of God’s love in human history. I sometimes wonder if the first two thousand years of Christianity have been more the religion of John the Baptizer than the interior, spiritual religion that Jesus brought into the world. I say all of this because I have seen so many Christians, on the one hand, and justice activists, on the other, who are morally correct in their actions but spiritually quite immature—doing the right things for the wrong reasons. Mature prophets make us conscious of both the patterns of grace and the endless disguises of ego.

Job: Embodying the Full Journey – Job was acquainted with the tears of things. Elijah, Jonah, and John the Baptizer could only go so far, but Job embodies the transformed perspective of a mature prophet. He refuses to believe that God is punishing him; he also refuses to punish God, against the good advice of all his friends. He totally rejects—with all evidence to the contrary—any logic of divine retribution and reward. We, created in the divine image, are therefore free from our own vengeance. And our neighbor is free from us. That is a safe universe.

The transformative journey of the prophets from anger to tears to compassion is the journey of the God of the Bible and those who read the Bible with love. Interestingly enough, the correlation between humanity’s behavior and God’s reward or punishment is the illusion that Job’s dualistic friends insist on—and that Job rejects. Yet we find ourselves still largely on the side of the four mistaken friends to this day. God does not love any of us because we are good. God loves us because God is good. Unconditional divine love is the fruit and result of this work of God in the soul.

The Alchemy of Tears: How We Learn Universal Sympathy and Grace

There is only one book in the Bible named after an emotion: the book of Lamentations. This is universal sadness. It is an invitation to universal solidarity. I now believe, that the gift of tears and the gift of healing are almost one and the same. Tears proceed from deep inside, where we are most truly ourselves. Tears reveal the depths from which we care. “How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations!” (Lamentations 1:1, NRSV). Life is inherently sad, the prophets want us to know. In this way, prophets invite us into the divine pity for all of creation. Tears have helped me glimpse the big secret that I still only half know—that human beings are really made of love and for love. It is the body that must somehow be held and healed and spoken to. The text goes out of its way to say so, as in Luke 5:14: “Jesus reached out and touched the leper, saying, ‘Of course I want to heal you.’ ” We are in one universal parade. God’s “triumphal procession,” as Paul calls it. In this parade, he says, we are all ‘partners’ with both the living and the dead, walking alongside countless ancestors and descendants who were wounded and longed for healing (2 Corinthians 2:14). Somehow, this empathy liberates us, even as it scours the soul. Our tears often become a slow, sad recognition that we also are now on the same tragic, but also victorious path. Maybe pain needs to be borne together, and for all time; it is very hard to bear alone. Crying, at its best, teaches us to hold the emotion instead of projecting it elsewhere. Carl Jung describes this movement toward wholeness as primarily energized and facilitated by conflicts of many different kinds. Conflicts always have a character of paradox to them: desire versus rejection of it, attraction versus fear of things, male versus female, right versus wrong, unity versus autonomy, me versus not me, life versus death, Christian versus non-Christian, etc. We move toward wholeness, I am convinced, by holding these conflicts and paradoxes together in the soul—and letting them work their natural chemistry there. It is all about waiting trustfully, holding without panicking, and anticipating, even in the silence, that an answer will be given. It is hope added to faith and love. In all of our lives, deeper love has to do with giving up some measure of control. I can live with, a sadness I can love with. Things do not have to be perfect for me to reverence them, respect them, honor them, love them, and forgive them. Most of us prefer the immediately measurable—and Spirit is never that. Wait and pray, a good spiritual director will say. Do not do, but allow and trust and wait, as Jesus advised his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane. Our only job is to keep the ego from trying to control everything, which it loves to do. Egocentricity keeps us small and self-centered, with no interest in anything beyond ourselves. A quiet allowing is much to be preferred to any strict controlling. Yet this is quite amazing and totally counterintuitive for most of us. Our divinely inspired transformation is a nonstop, subtle, autonomous action that we now call grace. It is not a substance or a thing that can be quantified, but a metamorphosis in the soul, a profound change of our inner processor, a new consciousness. From there, tears do their work, if we will just allow a little secret chemistry in the soul. Such subtle solutio is already and always at work.

The Three Isaiah’s: The Heart of Prophecy

Biblical scholars of the past century have suspected that the book of Isaiah is the work of at least three writers, not one, and was produced over a period that included both the exile and the return from Babylon.

I Isaiah – (chapters 1–39) was written by the prophet Isaiah, who lived, preached, and prophesied after his call around 742 b.c. (another time of war with Assyria), well before the exile into Babylon (597–538 b.c.). Here we begin to see the evolution of love culture in its expansion from self-love, to neighbor love, to love of otherness, which is the very nature of God’s love. Religious motivation is no longer based on fear of punishment but on compassion for all suffering. I Isaiah’s experience was expressed in the classic praise “Holy, holy, holy” (Isaiah 6:3), which mystics and liturgies still use in the presence of ultimate transcendence. We might now translate it as “Awesome, awesome, awesome” or even “Beyond, beyond, beyond.” Divine perfection is precisely the ability to include imperfection! God forgives by including the mistake and letting go of the need to punish it. We can do the same. Love and suffering are its two major wrecking balls, the first being positive and the second seemingly negative. The prophets teach us how to let both love and suffering operate together. This is their unique method and the only real way our personal redemption can also lead to a restoration of our surrounding culture.

II Isaiah – “But Zion said, ‘The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.’ Does a woman forget her baby at the breast? Or fail to cherish the son of her womb? Yet even if these forget, I will never forget you” (Isaiah 49:14–15). These words of trust, from the second Isaiah, are remarkable. Despite writing before the end of the exile in Babylon, around 597–538 b.c., this author already trusts that God will rescue the people of Israel. So a wrecking ball for the ego is hardly needed. All this author has to do is de-center all of the superiority notions of their nationhood, ethnicity, and culture, which the exile unfortunately achieves. Chapters 40–55 of Isaiah are also known as the “book of consolation.” There is a conspicuous lack of militaristic, win-lose language in II Isaiah despite the suffering of exile. II Isaiah senses what is coming—a religion based on grace and not on supposed perfection or performance: “Shout for joy, you barren women who bore no children! Break into shouts of joy and gladness, you who were never in labor! The four famous “servant songs” (42:1–9, 49:1–6, 50:4–11, 52:13–53:12) are a clear turning point in the whole Bible—the expectation of a very different kind of liberator and a very different kind of liberation. II Isaiah is written in the highly evolved language of the nonviolent resister whom we only began to hear by the twentieth century, in prophets like Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Bayard Rustin, Simone Weil, and Dorothy Day. It is the language of redemptive suffering instead of the universally admired language of redemptive violence.

III Isaiah – When you read the four “servant songs” prayerfully, they lead directly to the incipient universalism we will find in what we will now call III Isaiah: a grief-filled message that ultimately results in praise.

The Spirit of God has been given to me, Yahweh has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, To bind up hearts that are broken, To proclaim liberty to captives, Freedom to those in prison, To proclaim the Year of Favor from the Lord. (Luke 4:18–19, quoting Isaiah 61:1–2).

Most scholars now think that III Isaiah (chapters 55–66) was written by a whole school of Isaiah-style prophets who emerged after the exile around 538 b.c. the final chapters of III Isaiah entertain themes of universal liberation and salvation for all, beginning with eunuchs and foreigners (56:1–7), along with agnostics and the barely interested (65:1–9), continuing with many hints of universal salvation (through most of chapter 65), and moving into a total cosmology with a “new heavens and a new earth” (65:17; see also 66:22). These images will return again at the end of the New Testament (Revelation 21:1). Thank God the Bible ends with an optimistic hope and vision, instead of an eternal threat that puts the whole message off balance and outside of love.

Yahweh shouts almost in these words: I could give up on you, but I will love you even more—and even more generously and undeservedly! Isaiah is proclaiming a new illogical logic of unconditional love.

Ezekiel: Redemption and the Grace of God.

The book of Ezekiel will never be a bestseller or a popular read, but it is essential to the whole canonical movement from a seemingly incoherent world—which the author’s bizarre visions cleverly describe—to a universe filled with inner meaning and glory that we must know is shining through everything. Like Jeremiah, he breaks the link we all suffer from: the notion that love must be earned, that we can create worthiness. Yet this infinite character can only be realized in doses. Grace is not what we deserve by doing the right things, but rather a gift freely given by the Creator in the very act of creation. As Daniel Ladinsky renders Hafiz, “The sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me!’ ” “I will treat you as respect for my own name requires, and not as your own conduct deserves” (Ezekiel 20:44). God’s only measure is Godself. We can never forget that. Restorative justice—the divine freedom to do good at all costs—is quite simply God being consistently true to Godself. No reciprocity is any longer expected or demanded. This is why many of us firmly believe in “the universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21, NRSV). God works by the same pattern within the individual soul: forgiving and rewarding each of us “seventy times seven,” in Jesus’s words.

Prophesy over these bones, make them live. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. (37:4–5). It is like a Disney movie, with Ezekiel acting as the sorcerer’s apprentice. I read “eating the scroll” as a poetic way of describing “taking it all in”: both the beauty of this awesome, moving creation and the joys and desolations of our tiny lives within it. What is this divine and useless largesse all about? one must ask. What does it say about the nature of the Creator? What is the purpose here, and why did God take so long to show us the full body of God? I suspect cosmology might now serve where philosophy and theology first tried. As the resurrected Christ breathed on his disciples and commanded them to receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22), it is our very own breath—and God’s, too—that we breathe on the dry bones of this world. The wheels are still moving, and their rims are covered with “eyes all the way round” (Ezekiel 1:18) as God grants gifts of seeing to human engineering, care, and curiosity. The outer world reveals the inner majesty, and the inner world displays the outer mystery, or what we might call full incarnation! Conjunctio, the combining of what seems like two until they become one. This might help us to understand this metaphor of eating our words and fully digesting them. The divine word conjoins with us, just as it later does in the womb of Mary (Luke 1:38a). Ezekiel is forever telling us, “Prophesy to the breath…. Come from the four winds, breath; breathe on these dry bones, and let them live!” (Ezekiel 37:9). Our love matters in this universe.

It All Comes Down To Love

We still need, and have, those who expose the works of darkness and speak uncomfortable truths to us with courage and a proper humility—the kind that leads to weeping, not anger, blaming, and shaming. Our job is to guide their struggle toward love, not to deliver them altogether from struggle. Any focus on perfection was an utterly false and illusory goal that made Christianity into a cult of innocence. Christianity is not a purity cult that we use to prove we are superior beings. You just cannot see your failings or hypocrisy. Most people, ourselves included, are very defensive in the presence of criticism. Both the shadow self and the ego self depend on denial and disguise, and are all well practiced at it.

If Yahweh, the God of Israel, is as moody, inconsistent, petulant, and wrathful as many of us believe, and as much of the Bible seems to depict, then the whole universe is in major trouble. One could make the case that religion, along with being the best thing in the world for people who are inclined toward love, has also been the worst thing in the world for those who are still nursing grudges, wounds, resentments, and unforgiveness. We must see the patterns of growth that are woven throughout the Bible and allow them to work on us, or we have a dangerous God who is mostly undoing the universe and making it unsafe, ungraceful, episodic, and unhappy for just about everybody. We saw that growth in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, in the way God gives the people a new covenant of love. Like the prophets, we also must grow and change and move from dualistic anger to empathetic tears—and we must recognize that God has done the same. In the New Testament, Jesus is shown weeping at least three times himself: once for the collective, “Jerusalem”; once for an individual, his dear friend Lazarus; and once perhaps for himself in the garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44). Did any religion ever offer its adherents a weeping God in all of history? The prophet’s unique job description in Israel: a “licensed,” internal, faithful critic of one’s own people and leaders. They loved and honored Jewish customs, liturgy, and tradition, yet criticized the same mercilessly when they allowed people to ignore the poor and the oppressed. My hope and desire in writing this book is that we can recover the universal need for the role of prophet and prophetess in any group seeking moral authority, while also seeking to create and validate lovers and not just critics. Wounded healers are what we need. Wounded wounders, not at all. This dualism—the idea of an infinite God being caught up in a naïve reward-punishment worldview—must be undone by the deeper gospel of unconditional love and respect, or nothing will ever change. Something must break us out of the reward-punishment frame. It is too small and too self-serving. It makes the God of the ever-evolving and expanding universe seem equally small and petty, and it has already shown itself to create far too many small, petty, largely competitive, and happily vengeful humans. Somehow, the loving people I have met all across the world seem to know that if it is love at all, it has to be love for everybody.

In summary, the Jewish prophets inaugurate a critically different notion of religion, with two distinct but complementary roles of priest and prophet. The priests, like Aaron, create and maintain the religious container. The prophets, like Moses and Miriam, make the container worth preserving and enjoying. While the two roles might seem oppositional at first, they actually transcend any dualism if you understand them in their mature forms.

Prophets embrace religion as a way of creating communities of solidarity with justice and suffering.
They speak of solidarity with one God, which also implies union with all else.
They are essentially mystical and unitive, not argumentative.
They are for those who are suffering or excluded.
Salvation, to them, is the unitive consciousness in this world, not the anticipation of later rewards or fear of future punishments.
They are centered not on sin but on growth, change, and life.
They are not based in fear of God or self.
They call forth tears more than anger.

Tears of Things Download