Journey with Jesus #19

Here is the final Journey with Jesus Bible Study for November. Look for a series of three Bible Studies on the theme of Christmas coming soon - the first will be posted in the next couple of days, then weekly until Christmas. -Linda

Old Testament - Time to Come 11/19/09

The Old Testament prophets are famous for warning of a disastrous future of terrible violence resulting from the disobedience of the people. Perhaps the best examples of this come from the prophets Amos and Jeremiah. Amos lived in the relatively prosperous period preceding the fall of Israel to the Assyrians. He preached judgment to the wealthy leaders because of their neglect of the poor and oppressed. Jeremiah lived in the time of the fall of Judea and the subsequent Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE. While Jeremiah has some hopeful elements, Amos has no mercy. His book ends in total destruction. There is a final urgency in his message – “your time is up”. The storm clouds are already on the horizon. Jeremiah tried to overcome the complacency of his people. But then the hammer fell. He said things as they knew them were coming to an end. Jeremiah was considered a traitor in his lifetime, although he was ultimately proven right in his predictions – Jer 52:1-16 describes the fall of Jerusalem and its society.

This sense of time as an urgent future coming towards us is a hallmark of Old Testament prophetic teaching. It differs from the more stationary or cyclical sense of time present in many other ancient cultures. When John the Baptist and Jesus started to preach of impending destruction if the people did not repent it was therefore taken seriously. The Israelites had lived through it before and knew it could all come down again –and in fact did in 70AD, with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Our culture has absorbed this sense of urgency and so we live in the expectation of impending violence and doom. We live under the shadow of nuclear winter and now ecological disaster. Just think of all the “end-time” movies out there– for example The Day after Tomorrow, Terminator, and most recently 2012.

Another Old Testament prophet, Isaiah , had a different approach and a different sense of the future. He has an almost timeless, exalted vision of the future. The first part of Isaiah (Chapters 1-39) describes Zion as the city of God that will endure. All peoples of the world will come to Zion to learn the Law of the Lord. The future is an endless and boundless time in which the forces that take away life and peace are themselves done away with. It is the time when all life is fulfilled and accomplished on the Earth. Death has no sting in that future Earth filled with life. Is 25:6-10 describes the end of war, hunger and death. In their place there is a feast for all peoples, the end of disgrace, and death is swallowed up forever. This exalted vision is tied to the earth by a specific place (Mount Zion). This vision contrasts with the more abstract, ethereal and Greek understanding of life after death that is common today – of escaping the earth to a place out of time. This “heaven” is a static place of no movement. The world is left behind along with all of the things that makes time so oppressive.

Jeremiah ends with the destruction of Jerusalem. The Second book of Isaiah (from chapter 40) was also written at this time of absolute loss. A time without king, priest or other significant political or cultural leadership. In Is 42:1-4 a new figure is revealed – the “servant”. In Second Isaiah it is a person not a city who will put things right. He is described as gentle, hardly noticed. He respects the weak and is himself apparently weak. His teaching will go to the ends of the earth, the “coastlands,” and they are waiting for him. In the servant prophesies the peoples of the world do not come to the city, rather his teaching goes to them. Through this figure justice will come to the earth. The future is no longer something to be feared, but hoped for. And there is a sense that it does not have to be fought or strived for, but that it is going to happen inevitably. Just as with the earlier Isaiah visions of the future, this one is emptied of all that harms and destroys life.

The Old Testament opens up our sense of time. The prophets reject the concept of fate. They move away from the traditional cyclical experience of time and the focus on the times of sowing and harvest. While the seasons are good and beautiful they do not change the human situation. The Biblical story begins in a garden and ends in a city – the New Jerusalem. The city represents all that humans have brought to the world in the form of human culture. The future becomes a transformed human space here on earth where death and violence have no place.