Pastor's Corner
February 2025
Inspired: Resistance Stories
If there is any one group of people in the Bible that intrigue us the most, it must be the prophets. These are the people who stand at the fringes of the community, whose appearance and habits force them to stand out in a crowd. Who can forget John, the baptizer, with his camel’s hair tunic eating locusts and wild honey, or Ezekiel, lying on the ground next to a clay model of the city of Jerusalem in order to signify the siege that would soon come upon the city? The calling of the prophet was to speak the word of God, not as a fortune-teller, but as a truth-teller who “saw things as they really were—past, present, and future—and who challenged their community to both accept that reality and imagine a better one.
While there were times when the prophets spoke words of comfort, such as when Isaiah tells the people that their time of exile will soon be over, more often than not, the prophets spoke a word of critique against a people who were called to be a light to the nations. The prophets spoke the word of God’s justice that would right the wrongs, lift up the oppressed, call down mighty, and challenge the people to walk in God’s ways once again. Rachel Evans, in her book, Inspired, reminds us that the stories of the prophets are stories of resistance, letting us know that the God of the oppressed, the God of the marginalized, the God of the vulnerable, will have the final word.
These resistance stories intrigue us, sometimes with images that defy our imaginations and leave us scratching our heads as we seek understanding. At the same time, they leave us uncomfortable, knowing that the justice God demands, requires a reshaping of our own lives. Evans reminds us that too many of us in the west want to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the prophets because we have benefitted for so long from the status quo and from the oppression of others which cries out for God’s justice. Our privilege, and the ease with which we live our lives, numbs us to the pain of the oppressed minorities. We turn away so that we do not have to acknowledge our own culpability. It is for this reason that we, like those in every generation before us, have sought to silence the prophets. For, as Evans reminds us, “There’s just no denying that the very things for which Israel was condemned by the prophets—gross income inequality, mistreatment of immigrants and refugees, carelessness towards life, the oppression of the poor and vulnerable, and the worship of money, sex, and violence—remain potent, prevalent sins in our culture.”
Yet, the prophets still speak because God will not be silenced, and the one prophet through whom God spoke the loudest, was Jesus. Jesus, who ushered in the Kingdom of God, directly challenges the kingdom of this world and all of its demagoguery. Commenting on this, N.T. Wright declares, “God…has become King—in and through Jesus! A new state of affairs has been brought into existence. A door has been opened that nobody can shut. Jesus is now the world’s rightful Lord, and all other lords are to fall at his feet.” This Jesus, who took up the cross and bids us do the same, who turned the other cheek and bids us do the same, who cried out, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” and bids us do the same, is the Jesus who has taken the story of resistance “beyond prophecy, beyond songs of hope and lamentation, beyond satire and mockery, and beyond apocalyptic visions in order to declare the inauguration of a new Kingdom. With his birth, teachings, death, and resurrection, Jesus has started a revolution.” Jesus invites us to join the resistance with him.
From the Pastor.....
