The hope of heaven … on earth

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 1999 by Walter Brueggemann

The phrase behold his face suggests a liturgical vision:

   As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness;
   when I awake I shall be satisfied,
   beholding your likeness [17:15].

   O God, you are my God, I seek you,
   my soul thirsts for you;
   my flesh faints for you,
   as in a dry and weary land
   where there is no water.
   So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
   beholding your power and glory [Ps 63:1-4].

And of course we should mention the most familiar Psalm 23:6:

   Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
   all the days of my life,
   and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

Finally, I mention two texts that seem especially important. Psalm 73 is the intimate prayer of one who has trusted in YHWH and then almost gave up that trust in envy and jealousy toward those who did not have such piety and scruples. The speaker was ready to abandon the entire deal of faith as a bad job. And then this:

   Until I went into the sanctuary of God;
   then I perceived their end [v 17].

We do not know what happened in the sanctuary, but we know that it was a way of "coming to himself," a reframing of reality, a reentry into his "rightful mind," a re-embracing of sanity. Perhaps there was an image or an icon so that the experience is visual, as in Isaiah 6. More likely, in light of v 1 of the Psalm, the speaker came face to face with the claims of Torah obedience, with the summons of neighborly justice, with the reaffirmation that the world is morally reliable and coherent and therefore a life of Torah piety and obedience is the only viable way to life. It is in this sanctuary engagement that the Psalmist, so he tells us,

* recognized anew that initimacy with YHWH was all the really wanted in life, and not the hot pursuit of commodity;

* recognized that the alternative life of consumerism is a fantasy that cannot persist:

   How they are destroyed in a moment,
   swept away utterly by terrors!
   They are like a dream when one awakes;
   on awakening you despise their phantoms ...
   Whom have I in heaven but you?
   And there is nothing on earth that I desire other
   than you [vv 18-25].

This is a most remarkable claim that is made through the Psalter. A nervous kind of Protestant critique of excessively high cultic presence needs to be taken seriously. My wont is to come to this kind of wording, not metaphysically, but dramatically. The temple is the place of the alternative pageant, street theater that enacts a mode of reality that stands in deep contrast to dominant reality. The protection of a safe place for alternative hope is crucial for the maintenance of a vibrant faith, for faith and hope are profoundly unlike dominant culture that is so much sustained by infidelity and despair. The reason one cannot worship as well on a golf course is that the golf course is a function of dominant culture with its thin ideas of neighborliness and humanity. Thus entry into the temple is an act of resistance to all such dominant claims: a simple, lean, alternative focus in which dramatically, by word and gesture, the Wholly Other One meets us with the gift of life. The reduction of concrete hope to generic optimism permits a disregard of temple presence. But of course, generic optimism has nothing to do with this God, nothing with the gospel, and nothing with faith.