A text that redescribes

Theology Today, Jan 2002 by Brueggemann, Walter

This hope is a claim beyond data, beyond circumstance, and clearly beyond the myth of a closed world. The New Testament does not know how to say it well, but does not believe that the end of the life of Jesus is the end. There is more. And so he says:

Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age-houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, and children, and fields with persecutions-and in the age to come eternal life. (Mark 10:29-30)

And so the text ends:

The one who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen. (Rev 22:20-21)

And so we say regularly at the table:

For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. (1 Cor 11:26)

Until he comes!

This capacity to counter despair is seductive, for it can make us simply the happy optimist in town. I want only to insist that this hope is text-specific. It is not a generic generalization. It is a collection of texts that are precise, holy utterance in which God has taken an oath, vowed a vow, made a promise. It is this set of utterances, inscribed in text, that had been spoken over the world. The preacher and the church cling not to a generic sense of things but to specific promises over which God keeps watch. The hope that overcomes despair in its assertion of fidelity is as text-specific as is memory over amnesia that asserts generosity. The preacher and the church are always relearning that the despair sponsored by the dominant text is false. The scarcity it breeds, moreover, is a phony construct designed for power and greed, an excuse for violence. For, in the end, the antithesis of hope is indeed violence.

NEIGHBORLINESS AGAINST DOMINANT SELFISHNESS

The recovery of the text is to mediate a present tense of covenantal neighborliness in the face of the dominant text of anxious selfishness and alienated greed. The present, any present tense, is given its tone, character, and potential by the way in which it is related to past and future.

In the dominant text, I -have traced a nonexistent past of amnesia in which there are no fund of miracles and no memory of gifts but only the hard, endless work of self-invention. I have traced, in like fashion, a future of despair in which there are no more gifts to be given, but only a no-win struggle against scarcity. If that dominant text, as I suggest, is marked by an amnesia requiring self invention and a despair requiring self-sufficiency, it is not surprising that the present becomes a jungle of frightened meanness. The theologian of such a thin present tense, Gordon Gekko of the movie Wall Street, made it a credo to say, "Greed is good." That credo is not only shameless. It is inescapable, if one's past tense is burdened by self-invention and one's future tense is limited to self-sufficiency. It takes no imagination to see that technological consumerism, unable to host past miracles or future promises, has given us a present tense of greed, powered by anxiety and issuing in shameless brutality against the neighbor. The world, in such limited horizon, really has no option.