We continue today our series on the prophets, and we meet so many during this season of Advent! I don’t know if you’ve paid attention, but in our readings today we hear from not less than three different prophets! Zephaniah (OT lesson), Isaiah (Canticle/Psalm) and John the Baptist in the Gospel. Isaiah and John the Baptist are of course well-known prophets – Zephaniah not so much…so I would like to start by taking a minute to present this one.
– What we should notice right away is that Zephaniah is not well known to us because…he’s actually not well known at all! Unlike prophets like John the Baptist or Jeremiah whom I talked about in my last sermon, we know almost nothing about Zephaniah’s personal life and vocation – except for a very short genealogy at the beginning of the book. Most scholars assume Zephaniah lived and preached at the time of King Josiah, one of the last kings of Judah before the Fall of Jerusalem and the captivity in Babylon. And the Book of Zephaniah itself is very short: three chapters only, which is the reason why Zephaniah belongs to the category of the “Twelve minor prophets” as opposed to the three majors prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel). Now “Minor prophets” does not mean that they are “less important” prophets. The scroll of the twelve prophets contains as many verses as any of the three major other scrolls, and the minor prophets complete the predication of the major ones in a significant way (for reasons too long to develop here!).
Now if we start looking specifically at the reading we are given today by our lectionary, we will notice that once again we are presented with only one aspect of the predication of the prophet – if you remember from last time, we had three verses of Jeremiah out of fifty two chapters! Here we have a longer extract but the tone is actually very different from the rest of the book, so we have to turn back to the whole book to understand what it is really about.
The portion we read today from Zephaniah is an extract from the third and last chapter of the prophet. What Zephaniah describes in this portion of the chapter is a beautiful and joyful vision, a vision of a better future for the people, where all will be gathered with God in their midst in the Holy City (And it’s the same idea that we have in the passage of Isaiah we have just read, and it should also sound familiar as it reminds us of the Book of Revelation.)
Now if you remember, we talked before about the way the prophecies bring comforting visions to people in difficult times. And with the Fall of Jerusalem and the Exile, Zephaniah certainly wrote at a difficult time when people needed hope and to be reminded that God would have the last word. Yet we would be wrong to assume that what the prophets say is that now is a dark time but sit tight, wait, because suddenly God will be here and make everything better. Unfortunately, this is often the way it’s interpreted. Yet if we look closer, the dark times – and this is certainly the case in Zephaniah – are understood as an expression of God’s wrath, a chastisement for sins, and even if only God can bring better times, dark times will turn into better times when people change their hearts, repent and get reconciled with God.
– Now of course this is not very popular for most of us…God’s wrath, chastisement for sins, or even repentance? In our Lectio Divina group, a few weeks ago, someone made a comment about never having heard an Episcopal priest preach about repentance – I had to agree, never did I! In our churches, we have to acknowledge that we cultivate an image of God who never gets angry and forgives even before we have confessed our sins (that is, if we still believe in sin!). We dismiss all this as an “Old Testament” understanding of God. Now we have to notice that this understanding of God is still present in the New testament though, we see that it is still present in John the Baptist’s proclamation who talks about the “wrath” and the “fire” that are coming, as well as “repentance” for the people. So should we dismiss this aspect of the proclamation too, or should we try to understand what it means?
As usual, I certainly don’t have an answer to all those important questions, but there are a few things we can keep in mind:
1 – In the messages of the prophets, God’s anger is not an expression of God’s hate – quite the opposite, anger is an expression of God’s concern for the people. God is not indifferent. Everywhere in the Old Testament, God is described as the one who sees and hears the people and is moved with compassion. Today many people wonder if God is touched by the suffering of this world, but the prophets didn’t wonder about that. God does not “allow” bad things as we say now, rather God is angry at the evil committed by the people, especially the injustices and exploitation of the powerless –and this is actually the source of God’s anguish and God’s wrath.
As we consider that, maybe we can question our lack of anger at many things that should make us angry – not out of hate, but out of concern for those who are suffering and even out of concern for those who wrong them. God desires repentance, change, rather than destruction.
2 – In the prophets’ message, the chastisement is a consequence of sin – those sins, that in the Bible are idolatry and injustices. Dark times are brought on themselves by the people, they are a consequence of the actions of the people for the very reason that the world God created is not designed to work with sin. When sin is present, things go wrong, because sin cut us off from God. Prophets have a very strong sense of God’s holiness. God cannot be associated with sin, if people are sinful they automatically set themselves apart from God. Now what is important to notice is that they do that as people, it’s a collective understanding of sin. Those who suffer the most aren’t those who sin the most, that’s actually often the opposite: the poor suffer while the powerful take advantage of them, and that’s part of the injustice God cannot tolerate.
As we consider that, maybe we can question how our choices affect others collectively and what society we contribute to create. A lot of our world problems today are a consequence of our selfishness and of our indifference. In this sense, at least in the prophets, God’s wrath is a tool to bring about change. God is not an angry God because this is God’s character, rather God uses wrath to lead God’s people to react and ultimately to save the sinful as well as those who are oppressed by the sinners. Wrath brings about conversion.
3 – And so, what it’s really about is repentance. Or to say it differently, the visions brought by the prophets are not happy dreams that would work as the “opium of the people”. Those visions of a better future may help us cope yes, but also they invite us to change. The times will change if people answer God’s call found in the predication of the prophets, and if the people respond by their willingness to change. Deeply, all prophecies are a call to repentance – this is very clear in the message of John the Baptist we have today. All of John the Baptist’s proclamation was about repentance (Same with Jesus, at least in Mark – If you remember, Mark almost never tells us what Jesus preached about, he only says that Jesus asked people to repent because the Kingdom was coming). The prophets are not dreamers even though they have visions, rather they are down to earth people who are passionate about justice, speak the truth to powers and call for profound social change, and that’s what the new Jerusalem is about.
As we consider that, we may understand that repentance is not about feeling bad about ourselves – the reason why we don’t like to talk about repentance! The Prophets don’t invite us to feel guilty or ashamed, they invite us to act, to “bear fruits worthy of repentance” as John the Baptist puts it, with very simple acts of justice and integrity in our everyday lives. We will participate in the kingdom announced by the prophets as long as we are willing to live according to what this kingdom is all about.