A text that redescribes

Theology Today, Jan 2002 by Brueggemann, Walter

I suggest that the recovery of the biblical text is urgent, the most urgent "social action" that can be undertaken. For it is only when the past is brimming with miracle and the future is inundated with fidelity that the present can be recharacterized as a place of neighborliness in which:

scarcity can be displaced by generosity; anxiety can be displaced by confidence; greed can be displaced by sharing; brutality can be displaced by compassion and forgiveness.

In the great covenantal traditions of Moses, Deuteronomy, and the prophets, there is a sustained vision of covenantal neighborliness. Whether the texts are dated early or late, Norman Gottwald is surely correct to say that Israel-and consequently the synagogue, the church, and the mosque-is a "social experiment" in the world, a revolutionary alternative to see whether the daily social relationships, policies, and institutions in the world can be ordered differently. The Torah of Israel is a mandate from heaven, precisely located between deep generosity and long fidelity, that Israel take the world as a neighborhood. The most radical summons on behalf of the neighborhood is what Patrick Miller terms "the sabbatic principle," enacted as year of release and jubilee, whereby the strong give back to the weak their proper entitlement, precisely because the strong and the weak are bound in a common destiny.3 It is impossible to overstate the radicality or the centrality of this mandate, whereby Israel, in God's "tunefulness," repeatedly breaks the vicious cycles of anxiety, greed, and brutality.

The particular subject of this recognition and entitlement, at the core of covenantal ethic, is regularly "widow, orphan, alien." Indeed, that triad in Deuteronomy and the prophets is like a mantra, a mantra of neighborliness that characterizes the vulnerable, marginalized, and most at-risk people as the proper subject of communal investment. The prophetic tradition is not so much about scolding and threat as it is a massive act of imagination that asserts that the world could be different, if the present is informed by a freighted past and an assured future.

The mantra of "widow, orphan, alien" rings in the ears of Jesus as it rang in the ears of Israel. He had, presumably, been nurtured as a small child while his mother sang about "filling the hungry with good things." The cadences of "widow, orphan, illegal alien" are transposed in his text into "tax collectors and sinners" (Luke 5:30; 7:34). But it is all the same. It is action that is transformative of social relationships, action disapproved in a less generous horizon by a world schooled in infidelity that cannot share because there is not enough.

The church of late has mostly forgotten how remarkable and upsetting is the self-giving of Jesus. The church has gotten into the fear, scarcity, and survival business, precisely a denial of its Lord and its text, busy supervising a morality of scarcity, trying to keep the old world of anxiety in place. The text, of course, is otherwise. The giving of God that populates our past and the reliability of God that marks our future make life in the present different. It is our capacity to be amazed that equips us to enact the present tense outside normal boundaries and procedures. It is the chance of the preacher, out of this text, to amaze.