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Reality, Grief & Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks

Reviewed by Alun Brookfield.

I like Brueggemann’s books, so I came to this one with keen anticipation of something good, and I wasn’t disappointed. As always, the author writes with engaging, highly readable clarity, great erudition, and burning passion. Brueggemann is no ivory-tower academic, but a profoundly earthy prophet. Indeed, it is a happy combination when a man who is himself a prophet of the future church happens also to write about the needs, roles and tasks of prophetic ministry.

If the reader were to wonder whether WB (as I will refer to him from this point on) had moved away from his primary discipline as an Old Testament scholar, have no fear. This book is anchored firmly in the experience of the Old Testament prophets, struggling to make the voice of God heard in midst of the crises faced by ancient Israel, brought on by their misunderstandings of what it meant to be God’s chosen people.

His basic argument is rooted in the idea that Israel misunderstood their chosenness, and the entitlement and privilege that went with that, which needed to be countered by the truth-telling of the prophets. The Jewish leaders thought – or at least behaved as though – the normal rules of human existence didn’t apply to them; that their relationship with Yahweh made them an exception. As a result, the final destruction of Jerusalem followed by exile in Babylon created a cognitive dissonance which was beyond their ability to process.

WB argues that 9/11 was a similar moment for the USA, and so, in many ways, this is a book for an American audience. However, it is far from being ONLY for an American audience, because it does not take much imagination to grasp that 9/11 was an event which put the whole world system into crisis in a way which undermined so many of our basic certainties and confidences that the content of this little book has a much wider application. Surely, we here in the UK also hanker after a world now departed in which we, with our empire, then Commonwealth, also thought that we were somehow special, somehow chosen by God for greatness beyond our deserving. The recent upsurge of euroskeptic politics is, in my view, precisely that.

As a result, argues the author, we still to this day live in denial of so many of the facts which question our specialness, our chosenness. He especially addresses the churches, with our history of missionary zeal and enterprise, still thinking that all we have to do is come up with the right mission statement, the right kind of worship, the right technique for evangelism and all will be well again – the people will flock to hear and embrace the gospel and our churches will be full.

WB argues that those days are gone and will not return, so his first call is for the embracing of that painful and difficult reality, because unless we look death squarely in the face, we will not know how to deal with it when it comes.

But he’s not just writing to the churches. He’s writing about the role of the churches in relation to the wider culture. So, in the midst of a culture of denial about the future and clinging to the lost confidence of the past, he calls for a prophetic task of speaking truth in the midst of self-deception.

The trouble, argues the author, is that such reality, once grasped, can easily lead to despair, so his second prophetic task is to enable proper, healing grief to take place. All of us who are pastors will know immediately what he means. Which of us has not had to deal with families in the midst of the loss of a loved one, yet who are clinging to false realities expressed in sentimental hymns and poetry, and in false beliefs about the continuance of the life now gone? Such a reaction is understandable, clinging to false hope and false beliefs, but WB wants to encourage the church to speak a pastoral and prophetic word to our culture, encouraging and enabling it to grieve the losses. Here in the UK, we need to grieve the loss of empire, the emptiness of commonwealth, the loss of our sporting dominance (in football, cricket, tennis, rugby – you name it!). With all due respect to Andy Murray, we are still a second-best tennis nation! WB’s view is that, if we’re to move beyond the loss, we must make time, space, opportunity to properly grieve the reality that those days of greatness, confidence, security and affluence are now behind us.

What is interesting about WB’s approach is the way in which he analyses the behaviour of a nation in denial about loss and therefore not permitting themselves to grieve in a healthy way. He points to excessive consumption, equally rampant materialism and an obsession with entertainment as signs of a culture which is refusing to grieve. Unable to face the alternative of despair, unable to grieve the loss, the pain is submerged in constant activity.

Finally, the author argues that the purpose of the church is not primarily to evangelise, get involved in social action or – much worse – obsess about survival, but to offer hope in place of despair. In order to do that, we have to distance ourselves from the power-structures of which we have become part and not just speak prophetically, but live prophetically. That means learning from Jesus. WB quotes Terry Eagleton approvingly when he observes that:

“Jesus, unlike most responsible citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful”. (p.148-149).

Phew! But that’s a Jesus for our times, surely?

Buy this book – it could give your ministry a focus and a direction which will make sense of so much of what is happening in the world, the church and your neighbourhood.