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Prophets and Covid-19

The Old Testament prophets are often placed in the category of being fortune tellers. After all it is the prophets, such as Isaiah, that talk about the day when God’s Messiah will come. However, the prophets are offering us something more. The Prophets help us connect the dots between the world as it is and the world as it might be. A small example of this can be found in reading Jeremiah 4:11-12 and 23-28.

Reading up to and including 4:11-12 the people have become numb and apathetic towards God. Yet the prophet is out to jolt the people out of their collective denial and into the reality that human sin has wide ranging effects. Jeremiah offers a terrible warning that “a scorching wind” is coming their way.

Yet, just like us, the people remain in their denial. Verse 22 describes the people as “senseless children” with no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil without any perception of how to do good. The community is on the path of self-destruction. Even with this heartbreaking assessment of the situation God calls the Israelites “my people”. (See Ex.34-37) A sign of hope in the middle of calamity. Interminably bound to “my people,” God will again issue a call for repentance and give Israel an opportunity to change its future.

In verses 23-26 the phrase “I looked” is repeated to create a haunting undoing of creation. It is the creation story in reverse. The light (sun) has gone out, people and birds have disappeared and the land no longer produces crops. This reversal of creation conveys the hopelessness of the situation. God says that he “will not turn back” (v. 29) yet in Jeremiah 5:1,18 God offers some hope. In the coming disaster there will be a remnant who can rebuild the nation.

Walter Brueggemann, the highly regarded Old Testament scholar, suggests that this prophetic discourse “is not a blueprint for the future. It is not a prediction. It is not an act of theology that seeks to scare into repentance. It is, rather, a rhetorical attempt to engage this numbed, unaware community in an imaginative embrace of what is happening ... because ... evil finally must be answered for.”

Overall it seems that Jeremiah is out to engage the people's imagination. Their unthinking, apathetic, thankless ways of living, not only displays their disregard for God, it has created all kinds of evil. What Jeremiah is calling for is repentance. That is not just an acknowledgment of the mind. It is reconsidering how we do life. That to return to God means demonstrating a love for God that includes love for neighbor. If C19 has exposed anything about our lives it is that we too have often been unthinking, apathetic and thankless towards God and our neighbor. Let us use this terrible moment that feels like creation coming undone and use it to reconsider how we do life.

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