In modern movies ‘the prophecy’ or ‘the chosen one’ are a bit of a clichéd trope. No fantasy or sci fi franchise is complete without one. Snooty film reviewers often turn their noses up at this, deriding it as a cheap and lazy way to sprinkle a bit of cheap mystique into an otherwise paper thin plot. They’re probably right most of the time, but it clearly works, because fans keep queuing up to see the films. Prophecy is, of course, a fairly widespread phenomenon across cultures, but the reason why western audiences find stories about fulfilling prophecies and finding chosen ones so compelling must surely be down to the influence, however deeply buried, of the Hebrew prophets on our culture.

Compared to the other weeks of the Advent wreath, ‘the prophets’ really are an extraordinarily diverse bunch. Each one has something distinctive to add to our understanding of Christ’s first coming and our hopes for his second coming. But today I wanted to have a go at saying something about what they contribute more broadly as a group.¹

The Prophets don’t let us settle for false hope

In his 2008 book, The Reason for God, Tim Keller recounts the story of Prof Andrew Delbanco, who, while attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as part of his research, encountered a young man in one meeting who had a well rehearsed narrative explaining why all his mistakes were really someone else’s fault. The man is in denial and his story is an exercise in self justification. A man in his forties quietly quipped in Delbanco’s ear “I used to feel that way too, before I achieved low self esteem”.²

Keller uses this story as an illustration of the principle that the Bible’s teaching on sin can actually be a source of real hope. Only when we can escape from our self-justifying self-deceptions can we open ourselves to the work of divine grace in our lives.

In wider English speaking culture, the prophets have a reputation for being a rather gloomy lot. Jeremiah’s name is practically synonymous with stinging indictments. P. G. Wodehouse, one of my favourite novelists, often uses ‘like one of the minor prophets about to rebuke the sins of the people’ as a way of describing the look of someone about to let rip on poor old Bertie Wooster. And there is certainly plenty of rebuke in the prophets. But each of the prophets is, in their own unique way, gloriously hopeful. They are speaking to a nation which is sleepwalking into a cataclysm, offering them the forgiveness that comes from repentance, or else at least for the remnant, the glorious hope that comes after judgement. Their many denunciations of sin are there to shake the Israel/Judah out of their false sense of security, show them their situation as it really is, and draw them back to God.

And precisely because they do it so many times and in so many subtly different situations, the prophets provide a huge arsenal of material for cutting through our own self deceptions. The twistedness of our fallen hearts and the many and varied ways in which we try to convince ourselves, those around us, even God that we’re alright are exposed and skewered by the prophetic critique. This is painful. Often. But by helping us to see that we are not actually alright, and by putting words to the ways in which we are not alright, the prophets lay down a foundation for our hoping for something better – the renewal that comes through the healing grace of God.

The Prophets offer hope in deep darkness

I am a natural pessimist. I come from a family of pessimists. Back in the day they would have said that I have a melancholic temperament. And that means there is a kind of optimism that drives me up the wall – a shallow, peppy, Pollyannaish commitment to dealing with your problems by denying they exist.³

There’s a version of this that masquerades as Christian hope. You’ve probably experienced it at one time or another. The kind of approach that responds to suffering not by weeping with those who weep, but by skipping straight to an encouraging truth – “I know the plans I have for you” “all things work together for good” “I can do all things”. Obviously, those are precious truths, but divorced from the compassion that acknowledges real suffering, they become a cruel mockery of what comfort and hope should look like.

This is completely different from the solid hope that we encounter in the prophets. Almost all the Prophets either anticipate, or experience, or look back on the Babylonian Exile. This means that their oracles of hope are delivered into the most nightmarish of circumstances. It is difficult for us to imagine the trauma experienced by the people during this national catastrophe. The prophetic oracles are delivered into situations where people have seen the horrific latter stages of siege warfare, who have seen their neighbours and kinsmen slaughtered before their eyes in their thousands, who have seen women and children subjected to the most abominable cruelties, who have watched as their little ones are dashed against the rock or sold into slavery, whose homes and livelihoods have been irreparably ruined, whose every worldly hope has been suddenly, brutally brought to nothing, who have seen everything that was sacred to them defiled, who have endured the taunts and mockery of their captors, who have been abducted and forced to live in a hostile environment, who know they will never see home again, whose leaders have betrayed and misled them, who know the awful fear that perhaps God has abandoned them, and who know that this is what their own sin has brought on them. The prophets do not minimise the agonies that the people experience, and some of them (perhaps Jeremiah in particular) articulate their own sharing in them.

The prophetic hope is not a “pat on the back and an inspirational Bible quote” hope. It is a “yet even now…” hope. It almost seems as though the lower Israel/Judah’s present reality sinks, the higher the prophetic promise soars. As the darkness of winter presses in all the more thickly in the second week of Advent, so the light of the Advent wreath doubles.

Speaking as a natural pessimist, that is critical for me as I try to cultivate Biblical hope. The Advent cry of “Come, Lord Jesus!” can sometimes be an anguished one. More than once this Advent I have heard deeply discouraging news. More than once I have grappled with the frustration of my own slow progress in the Christian life. More than once I have read the news and felt that the world might be coming off its axis. The prophets do not offer me a “there, there, it’ll be alright” and for all I know it might not be. In worldly terms, worse might be to come. But hope that was first offered in the utter depths is hope that can weather the crises, setbacks, disappointments, failures, even the agonies of this broken world.

It’s not a classic Advent hymn, and it’s not on my standard Advent playlist, but for a song that expresses the lament side of “Come Lord Jesus!” in faith that he will eventually make all things new, this song below has been a comfort to me this Advent.

The Prophets give texture and flavour to our hope

I used to live with someone who is – or at least then was – the most methodical person I had ever met. You could set your watch by him – at least I could have if I had been physically capable of getting out of bed at the kind of time his routine began. Once, after reading a book which puts the poor state of much preaching down to our inability to grasp poetry, he bought a huge poetry anthology and read a poem each evening before turning in for bed. I remember thinking at the time that this combination of clockwork discipline and poetic appreciation seemed like the perfect mismatch of form and content⁴.

But, whether you like his system or not (personally I’m considering doing a similar thing as a New Year’s Resolution), with hindsight he was absolutely right about the importance of understanding and appreciating poetry – maybe especially for Evangelicals like me.

If the conservative Evangelical circles I have been discipled in has one real talent, it is for condensing complicated things into easy to handle summaries. I shared one with you in Advent I: People, Paradise, Presence. Brilliant. Memorable. Genuinely faithful to the substance of the covenant with Abraham. Just after university I did a church apprenticeship where we were trained to condense the author’s main purpose in a passage into a seven word sentence which told you what the author wanted his readers to do in response to the text. I learned skills there that I still use every day.

But there’s a danger to this talent, which is that it can lead to reductionism. In the hands of a lazy Bible reader “People, Paradise, Presence” approaches the prophetic oracles with a tick list, spots the three P’s and thinks ‘sorted’. The ‘seven word purpose’ approach can tend to reduce the Bible down to instructions for me without really savouring the revelation of God that it is first and foremost. Or, what is worse, it can reduce what is said about God down to mere information, as though one’s conception of God can be reduced to the propositions one believes about him. Neither of these are inevitable pitfalls, but I’ve seen myself and other fall into them often enough to know they are there.

But the prophets are, for the most part, poetry, glorious poetry. Poetry is irreducibly imaginative and affective. It is not merely a coded way of saying things which could more clearly be articulated in prose. It is meant to be reread, meditated upon, chewed over and tasted. It’s designed to stick in your memory and turn the things of everyday into signs of deeper realities. It might pass on information and require a response – indeed in Scripture it almost always does – but it is also supposed to elicit an experience.

The Christian hope is ineffable. Yes, in one sense it has been revealed already in Christ (1 Cor 2:9-10) but what has been revealed transcends our experience and powers of conception (1 John 3:2). Poetry is the perfect medium to convey this hope to us. Its kaleidoscope of images that cannot be neatly slotted into each other in any literalistic manner bespeak a reality that somehow includes and transcends them all. In substance they say “People, Paradise, Presence” in continuity with Abraham but oh, how much more tender is Isaiah 60 or Zephaniah 3:14-17 than ‘People’, how much more mouthwatering is Joel 3:18 than ‘Paradise’, how much more evocative is Isaiah 4 than ‘Presence’. With just the propositions I can, in some measure, understand the Christian hope. With the prophets’ poetry, I can begin to taste it.

The Prophets – Forerunners of Christ

Christians believe, naturally, that the prophets point to Jesus in their teaching. It’s a core principle of Christian interpretation of the Bible that it all points to Jesus. But the prophets also point to Jesus in their lives. Each in their different way foreshadows something of Jesus’ own life. Not least, of course, simply by being prophets and foreshadowing Jesus who is the Prophet. But even in some of the details. Isaiah’s preaching to a people who hear but do not understand is taken up into one of Jesus’ key summaries of his experience (Mark 4:10-12). Like Jeremiah, Jesus denounces the sins of the people but also weeps over the fate of Jerusalem.

Indeed, the prophets contribute to our hope by introducing an otherwise unaccountable logic to history in the form of typology. As we come to the prophets (including the ‘former prophets’, Joshua-2 Kings) in the light of Christ we bring an understanding of history shaped by the idea that the events of the past are foreshadowings of the life of Jesus. And it is no coincidence that so much of the imagery of the prophets is used in Revelation to describe the present and its relationship to the age to come.⁵ Just as the past foreshadows Jesus, the present and future echo out from his life and work, culminating, at last, in our blessed hope, the return of Jesus.

Sorry this is so late – regular readers will know that I juggle this alongside other commitments and it just sort of gets written when it gets written. I’m hoping to get something for Advent III out tomorrow and an Advent IV post to finish the series to drop on Sunday morning.

1.There is, naturally, a lot of overlap between the Prophets as a theme and the Scriptures, the subject of the BCP collect for Advent II. You can read my thoughts on that here. ↩︎

2. This whole paragraph summarises The Reason for God, pp160-161. ↩︎

3. Of course, not all optimism is like this and I’d be the last person to say that pessimism is the ‘best’ temperament. ↩︎

4. If you are reading this, you know who you are. I’m sorry – you were right about this and so many things that I was too proud or too lazy to understand at the time. ↩︎

5. Yes, I know that nothing is easier to get bogged down in than interpreting the book of Revelation. To simplify, I take a basically amillenial reading where the various visions are a series of ways of describing the spiritual realities at work throughout the whole of the period from John’s day to the return of Jesus.