“One thinks of the prophets of Israel, of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, all of them. They were par excellence the putters of words to things, and the words they put are so thunderous with rage and exultation, with terrible denunciations and terrible promises, that if you are not careful, they drown out everything else there is in the Old Testament and in the prophets themselves. At the level of their words, it is not truth they are telling but particular truths. They are telling about the nations and naming names, telling about Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, and above all, about Israel as a nation, and the truth they are telling until the veins stand out on their necks and their voices grow hoarse is the truth that by playing power politics Israel is not only bringing about her own destruction as a nation but is acting against her holy destiny, which is to be not a nation among nations but a nation of priests, whose calling it is to be a light to the world. At the level of words, the prophets speak historical, political, theological, and of course, ethical truths as powerfully as anyone has ever spoken them and as daringly, daring even to put their truths into the mouth of God Himself. “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies,” Amos has God say, “but let justice roll down like mighty waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-24). Nobody before or since has ever used words to express more powerfully than they our injustice and unrighteousness, our hardness of heart, our pride, our complacency, our hypocrisy, our idolatry, our shallowness, our faithlessness. These particular truths that the prophets speak were crucial for their own times and are crucial also for ours, and any preacher who does not speak them in his own right, naming names including his own name, any religious person who does not heave them at the injustice and unrighteousness of his own time and of himself, runs the risk of being irrelevant, sentimental, a bag of wind. But, at the same time, they are only truths. They are not the truth that Pilate asked for just in case there happened to be any. They are not truth itself, Gospel truth. They are not news because even in the prophets’ day they were not new.
But in addition to particular truths, the prophets spoke truth too, and that was when they were most truly prophetic. They did not speak the good news because the good news had not broken yet, but they spoke news. They put words to things until their teeth rattled, but beneath the words they put, or deep within their words, something rings out which is new because it is timeless, the silence rings out, the truth that is unutterable, that is mystery, that is the way things are, and the reason it rings out seems to be that the language the prophets use is essentially the language of poetry, which more than polemics or philosophy, logic or theology, is the language of truth.
You have only to hear it to recognise it because even in the stately cadences of seventeenth-century English it is there, let alone in the volcanic gutturals of ancient Hebrew. “Hast thou not known?” says Isaiah. “Hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fail; but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up on wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint” (Isa 40:28-31).
Hosea speaks with the dying fall of his own very different images. “I taught Ephraim also to walk, taking them by their arms, but they knew not that I healed them. I drew them with the cords of compassion, with bands of love, and I became as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them. They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to turn to me. The sword shall rage against their cities, consume the bars of their gates and devour their fortresses. Yet how shall I give thee up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? Mine heart is turned within me. My repentings are kindled within me. I will not execute the fierceness of my anger, and I will not return to destroy Israel, because I am God and not man, the holy one in the midst of thee…” (Hos. 11:3-9)
At the highest reach of his wildest hope, Isaiah speaks also in poetry. “There shall be no more thence an infant that lives but a few days nor an old man that hath not filled out his days. They shall not build and another inhabit. They shall not plant and another eat. They shall not labor in vain nor being forth trouble, and it shall come to pass that before they call, I will answer. While they are yet speaking, I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock, and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord” (Isa. 65:20-25).
At the lowest ebb of his despair, it is a poem that Jeremiah writes. “O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived. Thou art stronger than I am and hast prevailed. I am in derision daily. Everyone mocketh me…I will not make mention of thee nor speak any more in thy name. But thy word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forebearing, and I could not stay…Cursed be the day wherein I was born. Let not the day where in my mother bare me be blessed…Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labor and sorrow, that my days shall be consumed with shame?” (Jer. 20:7-18)
And finally the greatest poem of them all. “Who has believed our report and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant as a root out of a dry ground. He hath no form or comeliness, and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we shall desire Him. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from Him. He was despised and we esteemed him not…But He was wounded for our trangressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:2-5).
At the level of words, what do they say, these prophet-preachers? They say this and they say that. They say things that are relevant, lacerating, profound, beautiful, spine-chilling, and more besides. They put words to both the wonder and the horror of the world, and the words can be looked up in the dictionary or the biblical commentary and can be interpreted, passed on, understood, but because these words are poetry, are image and symbol as well as meaning, are sound and rhythm, maybe above all are passion, they set echoes going the way a choir in a great cathedral does, only it is we who become the cathedral and in us that the words echo.
Ethically, politically, religiously, the prophets say what they ought to say, to use Shakespeare’s phrase again, but beyond and even more crucial than that they say what they feel in a language that even across all the centuries and through all the translations and mistranslations causes us to feel them, too. At their most truly prophetic they speak things that my guess is that even they themselves did not entirely understand because they are things that are of truth itself rather than of particular truths, truth itself which cannot finally be understood but only experienced. It is the experience that they stun us with, speaking it out in poetry which transcends all other language in its power to open the doors of the heart. The man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. The one with the cauliflower ear and the split lip. By whose swollen eye and ruptured spleen we are somehow healed. Who can put a word to him and who needs to? They simply hold Him up our gaze. At their most poetic and powerful they do not say something as much as they make something happen.
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The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this minute he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including even himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them?
Let him tell them the truth. Before the Gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of their own lives and of his life. It is life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it not in terms of the words you make it bearable by but for the unutterable mystery that it is. Let him say, “Be silent and know that I am God, saith the Lord” (Ps. 46:10). Be silent and know that even by my silence and absence I am known. Be silent and listen to the stones cry out.
Out of the silence let the only real news come, which is sad news before it is good news and that is fairy tale last of all. The preacher is not brave enough to be literally silent for long, and since it is his calling to speak the truth with love, even if he were brave enough, he would not be silent for long because we are none of us very good at silence. It says too much. So let him use words, but, in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let him use words which do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask but which help us to hear the questions that we do not have words for asking and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and the silence that is the answer to those questions. Drawing on nothing fancier than the poetry of his own life, let him use words and images that help make the surface of our lives transparent to the truth that lies deep within them, which is the wordless truth of who we are and who God is and the Gospel of our meeting.”
