Perspective: The Voices of the Prophets

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The Voices of the Prophets

So woe to you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees.  You hypocrites!  You tithe from your luxuries and your spices, giving away a tenth of your mint, your dill, and your cumin.  But you have ignored the essentials of the Law: justice, mercy, faithfulness.  It is practice of the latter that makes sense of the former.  You hypocritical, blind leaders.  You spoon a fly from your soup and swallow a camel.

Matthew 23:23-24 (The Voice)

My brother had a book he would hold with pride

A little red cover with a broken spine

On the back he hand-wrote a quote inside

"When the rich wage war it's the poor who die"

From "Hands Held High" by Linkin Park

As someone who is no stranger to the religious section of the bookstore, I am very selective about the books I buy: I intentionally avoid certain authors and even certain publishers.  Sometimes, if I don't know much about the author of a particular book, I will check the endorsements to see if the book is endorsed by any of the authors I try to avoid.  In general, people tend to be selective with the information they consume.  For example, most people prefer unbiased news sources - and, by "unbiased news sources," I mean news sources that share one's biases.  Often, we consume information not to stretch ourselves, but to receive affirmation for what we already believe.

Basically, we don't want to hear what we don't want to hear.

But, once in a while, someone has to enter the scene and force us to listen.

In the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, there was a group of people who were brave enough to say the things that would upset people.  In fact, telling people what they didn't want to hear was their God-given mission in life.  The prophets were usually not considered a welcome presence, and their message was usually not well received.  Like most people, the people of Israel and Judah didn't particularly like to hear that they were doing something wrong and that they would inevitably suffer the consequences of their actions if they didn't make some changes.

Micah was a prophet sent by God to cry out against injustice in Judah during the eighth century BC.  Micah rather sharply called out the people of Judah for their complacency and unwillingness to listen, saying that their preacher of choice would be one who sermonized about the virtues of alcoholic beverages.¹

One indictment Micah issued was against the rich and powerful people who would lie in their beds at night, dreaming of other people's land, and then get up in the morning and dispossess people of that land.²  Though I'm sure that we all understand how wrong it is to steal a person's property, a look into Jewish Law will offer us some additional insight into the gravity of this crime.  According to the Law, land was never meant to change hands but was meant to be handed down as an inheritance.  If a land owner got into trouble financially, he was not allowed to sell his land, but he was allowed to lease the land to someone else on a temporary basis.

Though permitted if necessary, the leasing of land was apparently not considered by God to be ideal, for the next of kin was obligated by Law to redeem the land or buy back the use of the land from the lessee, if he had the means to do so.  If the land owner's luck changed over time, he was obligated to buy back the use of the land from the lessee for a fair price, taking into consideration the amount of time the lessee had been using the land.  Otherwise, the lessee would farm the land until the next Year of Jubilee, which occurred every fifty years.  At this time, the land owner and his family were to return to the land.³

Do you get the sense that maybe God wanted a family's allotment of land to remain within the family?

Land, according to the Jewish Law, was not something to be given or taken or bought or sold, for it all ultimately belonged to God and was held in trust by the people who lived on it.⁴  The rules restricting the sale of land were put in place because, to God, distribution of land was a matter of justice.  In the Law, God states the purpose of these rules thusly: "You shall observe My statutes and faithfully keep My ordinances, so that you may live on the land securely.  The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live on it securely."⁵  God did not want a privileged few to control a majority of the land, for God wanted all people to have the opportunity to work the land, to make a living for themselves, and to provide stability for their families.

In Micah's day, the rich and powerful disregarded the ethos of the Law.  By taking people's land, they took away the means for people to provide for themselves and for their families.  The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer.  Micah showed up to warn these transgressors that, while they were lying awake at night, plotting injustice against other people, God was plotting misfortune against them as well.  In the same way that the rich and powerful take away the land inheritance of other people, God will take away their own land inheritance and give it to their conquerors.⁶  In regards to a God-given blessing, if we misuse it or abuse it, we will lose it.

In my time in the religious book aisle, I have seen numerous books about discerning God's will for one's life.  What God wants from us is an age old question, and the prophet Micah gave us the answer to this question around 2800 years ago when he said,

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?⁷

I am convinced that justice, kindness, and humility are still what God wants from humanity today.

When I write to you about justice, I write as a white male who obtained a bachelors degree.  Some would say that my skin color, my sex, my educational opportunities, and possibly other factors have afforded me a place of privilege, meaning that I have certain undeserved advantages in society.  It is often difficult for people of privilege like myself to see the injustice at work in the world.  We typically like to think that we've earned everything we have and that none of it can be attributed to the luck of the draw; therefore, we quickly assume that all people have the same opportunities that we have.  There are many people in the world who do not share that same vantage point and see the world in a very different way - perhaps in a much clearer way.

We are living in a time when people of privilege need to start listening to the voices of the prophets in our midst, the people like Micah who cry out for justice.  Like the prophets of old, they are ready to tell us what we do not want to hear because they have seen for themselves what we do not want to see.  They demand our attention, and we must listen - not to judge what they say, but to allow what they say to judge us.

The ancient prophets teach us that God takes injustice seriously and that no amount of religious lip service will excuse it.  The prophets also offer us the good news that it is not to late to repent of our injustice.  We must listen to the voices of the modern-day prophets in our midst and seek the good for all people.


Notes:

1. Micah 2:11
2. Micah 2:1-2
3. Leviticus 25:24-28
4. Leviticus 25:23
5. Leviticus 25:18-19 (NRSV)
6. Micah 2:3-5  (See also the notes on this passage in The Wesley Study Bible (NSRV).  2009, Abingdon Press.  p 1113)
7. Micah 6:8 (NRSV)

The engraving of the prophet Micah was created by Gustave Doré in the 1800s.  It was made available in digital format by Wikimedia user Ariely and is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.