Keep silent— A meditation on prophets & prophecies

“Keep silent!”

(Amos 8:3c)

“…and they will never be uprooted again.”

(Amos 9:15)

Keep silent!  Last time I was reflecting on the fascinating question of who was actually speaking in the Bible, especially when it was supposed to be God.  But now, I am wondering:  Who is being spoken to?  The other morning, sitting on the porch with my coffee and my Bible, waving to the few people who walk by at 6:45 in the morning, listening to the cars pass on the distant tollway, and wondering what will be for breakfast, I was reading this section of Amos and getting kind of lulled into a scriptural stupor by all the woes and unto yous and thus says the Lords –as often happens when I am reading—my mind began to wonder. I probably was starting to drift off into a daydream of famine and drought, locust and destruction when all of a sudden I read:

That day, the palace songs

will turn to howls,

--declares the Lord, Your God—

the corpses will be many

that are thrown down everywhere.

Keep silent!

And I was startled out of my drowsing.  I was stunned by how direct that final command felt. And my immediate thought was: who is God talking to?

Was He talking to the Israelites who are howling in their palaces and throwing bodies everywhere?  Telling them to hold it down; what did they expect after all their sin and betrayal?  Was He talking to Amos?  Telling the prophet to keep this horrible secret to himself; i.e. Keep this between us! Don’t speak a word! Don’t tell the Israelites what is in store for them! Let it be a surprise.

A little research and I soon discovered that other translations have interpreted that “Keep silent” as a description of how the bodies of the slaughtered will be disposed: “Many shall be the bodies. They shall cast them forth in silence.” (NASB)

But I was still struck by that “Keep silent.” It sat there in front of me; a directive, a command even.  And I couldn’t help but wonder, if this is God’s word, in the end isn’t God really talking to me?  I was the one reading it? I was the one whose mind was wandering. Whose head was full of blue jays and car sounds and strollers and scrambled eggs. I was the one who was drifting aimlessly through God’s word, watching only for some new phrase to hang another essay on.  I wasn’t really paying attention. I was too busy being distracted by all the voices in my head…

Keep silent.

And from that moment on, I was focused. The voices inside me, the distracted anxious voices telling me I was wasting my time stopped. They were quiet. Even that voice that kept asking about those dishes in the sink from last night. Shouldn’t I get to those first. After I finished those dishes and made another pot of coffee, then I’d be able to give the Word of God the attention it deserved! Then… then… then… For the moment, they were all still. Silent.  And I read on.

Toward the end of Amos there is a beautiful simple statement:

“…and they will never be uprooted again.” (9:15)

Reading that I began to ponder anew: In hindsight what does a statement like that mean to a people who were to see their temple destroyed, their kingdom conquered, and so many dragged off into exile? A people who have (it seems) never really known the kind of stability it seems to promise; at least not for over 2500 years?   

It comes at the end of a prophecy of destruction; God’s wrath unleashed.  And yet God promises to plant them in their own soil and “they will never be uprooted again.” It seems to be a promise of peace and harmony, of permanence and stability in Israel. And yet, reading this promise 2500+ years later, one has to ask:  Is it just some words in a story? Is it a fairy tale? Some kind of magical thinking? Or worse, a lie? 

If it is a prophecy of God’s chosen people finding permanence and stability in the Promised Land, then it seems like foolishness. Historically the Jews have been displaced time and again.

But, as I sat –being silent—quietly contemplating this phrase, I began to wonder: is it possible God means something else entirely? Is it possible God is speaking not to a limited group of people here, but to all of His people everywhere.  Is it possible that this promise, though made specifically through the prophet Amos to the people of Israel, was actually meant to transcend that time and place; was meant not for a specific tribe or race, but for all God’s children? It is a promise to all of us, from God, that we can never again be uprooted; because He has planted us beyond the reach of the one who would uproot us. 

The LOVE of God became flesh, became a gardener (cf. John 20:15), a gardener who plants the seed so deep and so true it can never be uprooted. And His plow, His shovel, His spade, is the Cross. By His plow He opens the universe, opens eternity, opens even His own heart, and plants us so deeply within His love that we can never again be uprooted.

It is not by our efforts that we are saved, not by our lack of sin, but simply by His love, His grace, His Cross.  The peace, the harmony, the stability comes not from our prayers, not from our fasting or sacrifices, not from any restraint or self-control on our part, but from God’s love.

However, teaching our ears to hear and appreciate the harmony and beauty in God’s love takes some effort, at least for some of us.  We can’t find peace in it while we are letting our ego wnder, our eyes wander, our desires wander freely, and so we may find ourselves tugging at our own roots, agitated by wants and old nurtured longings.  And so, in such cases, we may find that prayer and fasting make good choir masters for the soul. They can help us train our ear to hear in God’s mysterious melody a beauty and glory we could never imagine on our own. All our desires are fulfilled in it, this endless glorious song of permanence and peace, if only we allow ourselves to hear it. 

If only we “keep silent” and listen.

The lie unpunished --a meditation

“…the word of the Lord came to the prophet

who had brought him back…”

--1 Kings 13:20

 I’m still thinking about this story. It won’t let me alone, though I may be alone in this.  For me, the real question is why did the story teller tell this story?  If we assume that the story teller behind the stories in the Bible is God, that it is actually His word, then my question is: why is God telling us a story about a prophet who lies to a “man of God,” and tricks him into not fulfilling God’s call, and yet the liar goes unpunished, while the man who was tricked is killed by a lion for not doing exactly what God told him to do… and—another thing: Why put the prophecy of this doom into the mouth of the prophet who lied?  Why would the writer/creator of this tale, whether it is God or just a regular old story teller, create such a troubling story? Why not make it neater, with an obvious moral for the edification of the audience?

And, for me, well… I’ve ben struggling with what the actual lesson of this story is.  And now I am beginning to wonder if that struggle, my struggle, isn’t the point –or at least part of God’s lesson.

I keep getting hung up on the unpunished lie, but this story is no more a story about an unpunished lie (and a king’s withered hand [cf. 13:4]) than Hamlet is a play about ghosts and sword fighting! Which is what I thought Hamlet was about when I first bought myself a copy at the used bookstore on Long Point (near the old Kmart). It was 1973 and the copy I bought (for .65 cents) had a drawing of a dead body, a ghost and a man with a sword on the cover –and since I had just finished reading Frankenstein and Dracula and (I think) had just seen Captain Blood for the first time, it looked like the perfect cover to the perfect book for me!  And heck, I already had part of it memorized: “To be or not to be, …”

Yet, –much to my 13-year-old self’s consternation— Hamlet is not really a play about ghosts and swordplay; as I have learned with time and reading and rereading, it is so very much more. It is a work that –in fact—reveals itself again and again to be so much more with each rereading.

There is a complexity to it, and a multiplicity of meanings that arise from its multi-faceted characters and plot and the boldness and largeness of its language.  Some readers will focus on the patriarchal elements and derive lessons about male dominance and female subservience, others will see themes of Oedipal conflict in the struggles between Hamlet and his step father (and his beloved mother), and still others will find Hamlet’s psychological turmoil over the idea of revenge to be the most compelling elements of the play… but, for me –when I taught the play to high school seniors—I began to hear in it man’s struggle to define himself and his place in a universe where he feels alone and compelled to make his own decisions about what is right and wrong; I heard in it a drama of life in a post-Catholic world.  At the beginning of the play, Hamlet returns from Wittenberg (i.e. Luther’s 95 Theses), and Laertes comes home from the University of Paris (i.e. scholasticism, tradition & Thomas Aquinas).   And throughout the play Hamlet questions whether he has the right to decide things on his own (i.e. interpret the world for himself), while Laertes does what he is told –i.e. obeys the magisterium of king, culture and family… Yes, I know there is more to it than that.  Seemingly nothing about the play is as simple as one might imagine upon first, second, third, fourth, eight, twelfth reading. The writing is so imaginative, alive and unsettling that each time I read it, I hear or learn something new; with each new gaze, the depths of works like Hamlet and The Divine Comedy, Homer’s epics, The Bible, seem only to grow deeper and the truths ever more profound.  One is left to wonder who wrote such things (and how). 

Which brings me back to the enigmatic story at hand. In my reading, the complexity in this story derives more from what has been left out than what has been included.  The fact that no judgment is offered about the prophet who lies, leaves us to ponder his actions, and his role in the story?  To contemplate the meaning of his role.  And why God would continue to use him to voice his message.  What could that mean? According to my Jerome Biblical Commentary some scholars have argued that this is a midrash story redacted into a historical document, and their focus is on the “man of God” punished for being disobedient, but my focus is on the source of his disobedience: the unpunished lie. The more I meditate on this element of the story, the stranger it seems to me.  Of course, one might dismiss this enigmatic element by saying: clearly it wasn’t important to the author; so let it go and move on.  Don’t waste your time.

But when I was learning to pray Lectio Divina we were taught to hang onto that little piece, that word or phrase or element that caught our attention –hold onto it, because that was what we were being given to ponder.  

And so, there are two things I am still turning over in my head about this apparently unpunished lie.  First: was it actually unpunished?  Is the punishment of the lie found in the message the lying prophet is called to deliver?  When he turns to his dinner guest and says:

“This is what the Lord says: ‘You have defied the word
of the Lord and have not kept the command the Lord your
God gave you. You came back and ate bread and drank
water in the place where he told you not to eat or drink.
Therefore your body will not be buried in the tomb
of your ancestors.’”—1 Kings 13: 21-22

What horror must have run through his own mind –being the one who lied to the “man of God,” knowing that it was through him and his lie that God’s word had been defiled; is that not (perhaps) his punishment: to live with the knowledge of the dishonor and doom that he helped bring to a fellow prophet?  Certainly some of my own worst memories are of the evil I have brought to others, even more than the evil I have committed on my own.

And second: perhaps one thing God is telling me, is this:  it’s not always about the answers; sometimes it is about the questions.  The complexity of this little simple story inspires me to ask and ponder –and maybe what God is teaching me through it is this: nothing is ever as simple as it looks.  Open your eyes. Open your heart. Look. Listen. Ponder… Ask questions. Ponder some more. 

How often do we look at someone and think: oh, she’s this or he’s that… she’s a snob, or he’s a bully, or she’s a conservative and he’s a liberal, or she’s a goth and he’s a jock… We dismiss the complexity of their humanity by compressing it into a label.   But, no one is that simple.  Everyone contains a multitude of sorrows and joys and contradictions --unspoken… The truth is, as Bob Dylan once said: "...even the president of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked..." There is always something more to be revealed.  And (of course) some things that need to stay between you and your bathroom mirror....  Anyway, as Hemingway so famously claimed, sometimes the most important part of a story –is what was left out.  Think about that for a while... and when you're done, ponder it some more.