The hope of heaven ... on earth.

Abstract

This paper asks about the substance and practice of hope in First Testament faith. The paper was prepared for a conference on the Christian "hope of heaven." In such a context, it is evident that hope in the First Testament is principally a this-worldly act. It is suggested in the paper that (a) Israel's memory of God's miracles permits Israel to expect miracles in the future, (b) Israel's speech practice in complaints is an act of hope, as the complaints characteristically move to affirmation, and (c) the fissure of the exile is the matrix of Israel's hope. Out of these affirmations, Israel can hope for a new community of shalom, a new creation of well-being, and eventually a new personal destiny as a gift of God. Every dimension of hope is hope in the God who is able to do a new thing.

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Te First Testament provides some of the materials out of which firmer convictions on the subject of hope were later reached. It is important that we have some good sense about the gift of those materials themselves, before tracing later usage of them. It is equally important to recognize that the First Testament itself does not sponsor or subscribe to all the hopes that subsequently have been derived from the text. This is not because the First Testament is primitive or underdeveloped or inferior. It is rather that it goes about the "human predicament" very differently from our usual religious way of thinking. This very different way is of immense importance in the modern world. Thus our task is to reflect upon the discontinuity and difference in this tricky act of hope, so that we may appreciate the rich continuity without falling into a one-dimensional homogeneity.

Hope in the Present

Our lead phrase, hope of heaven, is a suggestive beginning point. The First Testament, I suggest, majors in hope. It is this ancient faith that intrudes into a Greek world of rationality with new possibility that is not extrapolated from what is and has been. In all parts of this Scripture, Israel attests to its conviction that YHWH, creator of heaven and earth and deliverer from Egypt, is indeed governor of the future and will bring into every present tense an inexplicable newness that is beyond all present categories.

At the same time, I am bound to say that this textual tradition has almost no interest in "heaven" as a place of hope in our usual sense, almost no speculation beyond the present space-time ordering of things. Indeed, "heaven" appears nowhere in the text as a place of appeal for "life after death," nowhere as a place where the dead go.

We shall immediately sense the oddness of the faith of the First Testament if we recognize that heaven is not a place for the dead, but a place where the government of God (= Kingdom of God = Kingdom of Heaven) is seated. In a world of polytheism, this is where "the divine council" of the gods meets on a regular basis to determine the policies to be implemented on earth (see Mullen). In a more rigorous monotheism, YHWH is so superior to all other members of the divine council, variously termed "angels," "messengers," "sons of God," that they are subordinate figures who keep attendence on YHWH, sing praises to YHWH, and run, even to the earth, to do the bidding of YHWH. Thus, in the narrative dream of Jacob the fugitive, there is a ladder of angels--messengers--going down and up connecting heaven and earth (Gen 28:12). In the temple in Jerusalem, prayers petition God, "Hear thou in heaven" (1 Kgs 8:30), and the prophet has visions of YHWH high and lifted up and surrounded by adoring seraphim (Is 6:1-4). And in the end, the church prays daily, "Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." In that prayer, the church knows that God's wondrous rule is fully and gladly in effect and without challenge in the zone of heaven. The church knows that; it hopes as deeply as it knows that soon or late the good governance of God will be established in the earth when all impulses to the contrary are defeated or nullified. This hope is deep and vigorous and resilient; it is a hope rooted in heaven, not about going there, but about heaven--God's wondrous rule--coming here on earth, where God's full rule is not yet in effect. This hope is undeterred by circumstance, but is at the same time deeply candid about circumstance. The voice of Israel's faith makes clear beyond dispute that other powers still have a voice in our earthly governance, voices of death and disorder ... and so we wait!

Israel's hope of heaven come to earth is not at all speculation or fantasy, but is rooted in the daily, concrete realities of Israel's present life. Hope is an action of faith here and now, with eyes wide open about the concrete realities of life. I will identify four resources available to Israel out of which it dared to hope lyrically and daringly. These resources focus upon the problematic and the possibility of the earth, and consider the possible incursions of the transformative power of heaven upon earth.

Hope Rooted in Memory

Israel's hope is deeply rooted in, shaped and formed by, and legitimated through its memory (see Yerushalmi; Brueggemann 1991). Whatever positivistic science may conclude about Israel's past, it is evident that Israel's remembered past provides the materials and courage for any anticipation of what may yet come from God's goodness. That memory concerns peculiar, nameable instances when the incommensurate power of God decisively impinged upon the earth. Here I will mention five different sorts of material that show Israel as a total rejecter of amnesia, with the awareness that communities in amnesia cannot hope.

First, the largest circle of memory is that of the flood narrative, an account that remembers most broadly and most deeply the moment when YHWH committed YHWH's own self to the earth (on the cruciality of this tradition for Israel's faith, see Miller 1995: 155-68).

In a dramatic gesture of sovereignty YHWH nullified the powers of chaos. The flood narrative must be under. stood as Israel's attempt to speak about the most elemental, most primordial threats to ordered life in the world. Israel knows that life at bottom is under assault, enough assault to generate anxiety and to place all of life in jeopardy.

Israel remembers YHWH's deep act of fidelity, wherein the chaotic waters subside and the earth receives a guarantee of the orderliness of life-giving patterns of creation by the decree of YHWH:

   As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest,
   cold and heat,
   summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease [Gen 8:22]

And then, in an unprecedented and unparalleled act, YHWH is remembered as having committed YHWH's own self to the world, an act of commitment expressed as eternal covenant, a connection beyond breaking or violation (Gen 9:8-17).

Second, Israel's more local memory is a tale of the ancestors in Genesis: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is there that YHWH makes a solemn and firm promise to see this community well into the future, to give them land, progeny, and a great name. That promise, intrinsic to Israel's life in the world, is given from one generation to the next, kept intact though not without the threats and vagaries of family dysfunction. Indeed, one can say that the Genesis ancestors constitute a badly dysfunctional family. They remembered, moreover, that in every generation of mothers--from Sarah to Rebekah to Rachel--the mothers are barren. Sons are not given, heirs are lacking; time after time the family comes close to shutdown without a future. And then, wondrously, each time, an heir is given in the last moment and shutdown is averted. By that gift from YHWH, the future is kept open for Ysrael, not by "flesh and blood," but by the faith that lives from and lives toward God's promises of well-being that hover over and define Israel's life. Out of these treasured stories comes the deep conviction that Israel's future is held in YHWH's good hand, and that God gives that future generously, but only in God's good way and in God's good time.

Third, the durable stories of the ancestors are matched by the abrupt, energizing narrative of the Exodus. This is a very different narrative from a very different circle of tradition. The crisis context of slavery and exploitation is palpable in the story. The cry of Israel demands immediate redress from YHWH. The cry serves both to get attention from YHWH and to mobilize YHWH into action. Once this has been accomplished, there is a mighty and dramatic contest with the Pharaoh, a force of chaos and evil. The contest culminates, of course, in the mighty waters of the Red Sea when the Lord of the flood is seen yet again to be capable of handling the waters toward a new well-being. The great rescue through the waters permits Miriam and her singing sisters to dance and celebrate, even to gloat a little (Ex 15:20-21).

The Exodus narrative, inscribed as a Passover liturgy, is Israel's unrelenting ritual claim that YHWH's will for well-being can override all the structures of oppression and all the forces of death. YHWH, before the very eyes of Israel, is capable of a gift of earthly newness precisely where none seemed possible. Israel started singing and, since that time, has sung its great emancipation as a gift from YHWH in many different contexts, in the face of many oppressors, and in the face of the mighty power of negation.

Fourth, in the gift of the Land, partly free gift of YHWH and partly violent seizure, the memories of Israel come together. This is the land promised to the ancestors in the book of Genesis, the ones who always received heirs just in time. This is the land for which Israel left slavery and traversed the wilderness. This is the good land, the fertile land, envisioned in creation and guaranteed as the waters of the flood receded. This is the land that was otherwise occupied but has come to Israel as a mighty wonder and gift of YHWH.

In its reception and division of the land, Israel could see clearly that YHWH intended for its life all the blessings of shalom, the gifts of fertility and prosperity and peace and security and well-being. The land in its productivity bears witness to the power of blessing that YHWH has ordained in the land, the indwelling power of new life that is YHWH's gift. It is the gift of land that assures that Israel's discernment of God and of their life with God is definitionally this-worldly, material, public, and social. The commands of Sinai are given to Israel so that the land may be occupied, ordered, and practiced according to the shalom of YHWH.

In the fifth place, Israel had its large and defining memories endlessly available in a well stylized form. Indeed, the whole of its past is articulated as a lyrical doxology, so that its entire remembered life with YHWH is shaped as a series of wonders, of miracles attesting to and signifying God's irresistible gift of new life, even in the most unlikely circumstances. The miracles of YHWH, moreover, bespeak fidelity, a fidelity that is YHWH's own impulse that is writ deep in the lived life of the world. Thus Psalm 136 is a recital of Israel's past: creation (vv 4-9), Exodus (vv 10-15), land reception (vv 16-22), all framed in vv 1-3 and vv 23-26 as a staggering expression of gratitude to YHWH. While the particulars are given by the choir, the congregation in the background, in every half verse, reiterates the interpretive code, "for his steadfast love endures forever." All the memories attest to a deep, abiding, defining fidelity from YHWH. Israel lives from and for and toward and with that fidelity that is not broken or deterred by any circumstance.

Thus Israel from generation to generation lives in a freighted matrix of memory the content of which is miracle of fidelity. These are miracles that Israel can specify and name, and that impact the real world of life on earth. We can see the power of that memory, now categorized as "faithfulness, mercy, and steadfast love," if we consider the poetry of Lamentations 3:18-24. Set in a context of deep dismay concerning the loss of Jerusalem, the poet declares that his hope was evaporated, defeated by circumstance (v 18). Then, however, in the next verses he remembers, as a person of faith will inescapably do:

   But this I call to mind,
   and therefore I have hope [Lam 3:21].

Remembering produces hope:

   The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
   his mercies never come to an end;
   they are new every morning;
   great is your faithfulness.
   The Lord is my portion, says my soul.
   therefore I will hope in him [Lam 3:22-24].

The entire heritage of Israel is a program of hope concerning God's good enactment of a world of peaceable possibility.

A Way of Speaking

Israel's second resource for hope is a way of speaking this rich, buoyant past in and through dire circumstance. Israel's most characteristic speech is the Psalm of complaint or lamentation (Brueggemann 1984; Miller 1994: 55-134). Our subject of hope requires that this material be recovered, though it has been largely gien up in the wholesale denial of the established church, either given up by disregard or sung to such nice music that no one notices.

Israel's lived present tense was often in profound tension with the remembered wonders of YHWH from the past. Frequently the present circumstance of life was overwhelmed by the powers of negation that immobilized and savaged the community. Israel refused to deny or to ignore that deep contradiction between past wonders from God and present troubles. As a response to that incongruity, Israel developed a characteristic mode of speech--lament or complaint--that spoke vigorously and assertively about the trouble, and that shrilly summoned YHWH back into play, YHWH who had either caused or permitted a void by absence and neglect. Israel's capacity to develop such a tradition of utterance of course did not happen in a vacuum. There is all around Israel and long before Israel a stylized practice of such utterance. It is nonetheless important that Israel was able to appropriate that long-standing practice for the distinctiveness of its own faith.

Fully one third of the entire book of Psalms consists in this speech of grievance. Expressed in the most hyperbolic, regressive language, as trouble people are wont to do, every immobilizing trouble--personal as well as communal--is understood to be an encounter with the power of cosmic negation, that is, the power of death:

   O Lord, how many are my foes!
   Many are rising against me;
   many are saying to me,
   "There is no help for you in God" [Ps 3:1-2].

   O Lord my God, in you I take refuge;
   save me from all my pursuers, and deliver me,
   or like a lion they will tear me apart;
   they will drag me away, with no one to rescue [Ps 7:1-2].

   Attend to me, and answer me;
   I am troubled in my complaint.
   I am distraught by the noise of the enemy,
   because of the clamor of the wicked.
   For they bring trouble upon me,
   and in anger they cherish enmity against me.
   My heart is in anguish within me,
   the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
   Fear and trembling come upon me,
   and horror overwhelms me.
   And I say, "O that I had wings like a dove!
   I would fly away and be at rest;
   truly, I would flee far away;
   I would lodge in the wilderness;
   I would hurry to find a shelter for myself
   from the raging wind and tempest" [Ps 55:2-8].

   They set a net for my steps;
   my soul was bowed down.
   They dug a pit in my path,
   but they have fallen into it themselves [Ps 57:6].

   Deliver me from my enemies,
   O my God;
   protect me from those who rise up against me.
   Deliver me from those who work evil;
   from the bloodthirsty save me.
   Even now they lie in wait for my life;
   the mighty stir up strife against me.
   For no transgression or sin of mine, O Lord,
   for no fault of mine, they run and make ready [Ps 59:1-4].

The community dares to assert, on occasion, that the trouble is God's own neglect and infidelity:

   Yet you have rejected us and abased us,
   and have not gone out with our armies.
   You made us turn back from the foe,
   and our enemies have gotten spoil.
   You have made us like sheep for slaughter,
   and have scattered us among the nations.
   You have sold your people for a trifle,
   demanding no high price for them.
   You have made us the taunt of our neighbors,
   the derision and scorn of those around us.
   You have made us a byword among the nations,
   a laughingstock among the peoples.
   All day long my disgrace is before me,
   and shame has covered my face
   at the words of the taunter and revilers,
   at the sight of the enemy and the avenger.
   All this has come upon us,
   yet we have not forgotten you,
   or been false to your covenant.
   Our heart has not turned back,
   nor have our steps departed from your way,
   yet you have broken us in the haunt of jackals,
   and covered us with deep darkness [Ps 44:9-19].

With the characteristic statement of deep need voiced shrilly (on this shrillness, see Blumenthal: 85-110 and passim), the troubled psalmist does not hesitate to address God in large and demanding imperatives:

   Rise up, O Lord!
   Deliver me, O my God! [Ps 3:71.
   Turn, O Lord, same my life;
   deliver me for the sake of your steadfast love.
   For in death there is no remembrance of you;
   in Sheol who can give you praise? [Ps 6:41.
   Rise up, O Lord, in your anger;
   life yourself up against the fury of my enemies;
   awake, O my God; you have appointed a judgment [Ps 7:6].
   Hear my prayer, O God;
   give ear to the words of my mouth [Ps 54:2].

   Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
   for in you my soul takes refuge;
   in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
   until the destroying storms pass by.
   I cry to God Most High,
   to God who fulfills his purpose for me.
   He will send from heaven and save me,
   he will put to shame those who trample me [Ps 57:1-3].
   O God, break the teeth in their mouths;
   tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord!
   Let them vanish like water that runs away;
   like grass let them be trodden down and wither [Ps 58:6-7].

Nothing nice about this; the powers of negation (death) are regarded savagely, and YHWH is treated brusquely and demandingly.

The astonishing claim of these prayers that Israel voiced to God is that they are acts of hope. They are not statements of obedient resignation. They are, rather, determined, resolved, unintimidated protests against the present circumstance, and a deep insistence that it will be different, it must be different, and God must make it so. Indeed, it is plausible that the complainer is the quintessential utterer of hope in the Bible (Gerstenberger: 64-72). Hope is not nice and smooth and politic. It is characteristically brusque and assertive.

The church, not wanting hope to be so vigorous or insistent, has often found such insistent speech ignoble and unworthy. As a result, the church has either eliminated such acts of hope completely from the repertoire of faith or reduced such rich, bold theological acts to psychological transactions, making them nothing more than acts of catharsis. Such a maneuver, of course, siphons off all the energy of hope and in the end invites despair ... because nothing will ever change. Thus I will insist that biblical hope for God's good future is rooted in a protesting rejection of an unbearable present tense, and a demand against God that it will be different in the future if God can be moved to act. Such hope is not for nice people or for wimps. Hope so uttered is a refusal of what is available and an entitlement to something better.

Specific, Temple-situated Utterance

The practice of memory and the utterance of a protesting hope are not an amorphous operation, but are specific and local, set in the temple, understood as the place of YHWH's forceful, definitive presence (this treatment of the temple is indebted to Lindstrom). This hope needs to be understood as the authorized, liturgical activity of those who have a high view of the presence of God, the God who can defeat the powers of negation, that is, the powers of death (see Ollenburger).

Specifically, the term face is in the First Testament often understood as the altar that signifies YHWH's abiding, effective power and presence. Thus religious pilgrimage to the temple is entry into the joy and well-being of God's own company. In the familiar priestly blessing of Numbers 6, the phrase The Lord cause his face to shine upon you is a priestly utterance that has to do with the conviction that YHWH is present in the shrine, so that the power of life concentrated there will defeat the powers of death. Here I will simply call attention to the temple theology that locates the natural habitat of prayers of hope. Some of them are chagrined statements of absence; some are statements of insistent hope:

   How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
   How long will you hide your face from me?
   How long must I bear pain in my soul?
   And have sorrow in my heart all day long?
   How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? [Ps 13:1-2].
   One thing I asked of the Lord,
   that will I seek after:
   to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
   and to behold the beauty of the Lord,
   and to inquire in his temple [Ps 27:4-5].

The imagery of shelter, tent, and rock may be taken as references to the locus of the temple:

   To you, O lord, I call;
   my rock, do not refuse to hear me,
   for if you are silent to me,
   I shall be like those who go down to the Pit.
   Hear the voice of my supplication,
   as I cry to you for help,
   as I lift up my hands
   toward your most holy sanctuary [Ps 28:1-2].

In Psalm 31, the yearning for a safe place is intense:

   Be a rock of refuge for me,
   a strong fortress to save me.
   You are indeed my rock and my fortress;
   for your name's sake lead me and guide me ...
   for you are my refuge [vv 2-4].

In Psalm 35, the rejoicing is likely to be understood as congregational singing:

   Then my soul shall rejoice in the Lord,
   exulting in his deliverance [v 9; see 20:1-3].

The source of hope is the holy place of presence, the place of YHWH's dwelling:

   Sing praises to the Lord, who dwells in Zion.
   Declare his deeds among the peoples.
   ... so that I may recount all your praises,
   and, in the gates of daughter Zion,
   rejoice in your deliverance [Ps 9:11-14].

These verses are nicely circumscribed precisely by "Zion ... Zion." It is likely that these great statements of trust in the Psalter are more place-bound than we usually imagine:

   For the Lord is righteous;
   he loves righteous deeds;
   the upright shall behold his face [Ps 11:7].

The phrase behold his face suggests a liturgical vision:

   As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness;
   when I awake I shall be satisfied,
   beholding your likeness [17:15].

   O God, you are my God, I seek you,
   my soul thirsts for you;
   my flesh faints for you,
   as in a dry and weary land
   where there is no water.
   So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
   beholding your power and glory [Ps 63:1-4].

And of course we should mention the most familiar Psalm 23:6:

   Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
   all the days of my life,
   and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

Finally, I mention two texts that seem especially important. Psalm 73 is the intimate prayer of one who has trusted in YHWH and then almost gave up that trust in envy and jealousy toward those who did not have such piety and scruples. The speaker was ready to abandon the entire deal of faith as a bad job. And then this:

   Until I went into the sanctuary of God;
   then I perceived their end [v 17].

We do not know what happened in the sanctuary, but we know that it was a way of "coming to himself," a reframing of reality, a reentry into his "rightful mind," a re-embracing of sanity. Perhaps there was an image or an icon so that the experience is visual, as in Isaiah 6. More likely, in light of v 1 of the Psalm, the speaker came face to face with the claims of Torah obedience, with the summons of neighborly justice, with the reaffirmation that the world is morally reliable and coherent and therefore a life of Torah piety and obedience is the only viable way to life. It is in this sanctuary engagement that the Psalmist, so he tells us,

* recognized anew that initimacy with YHWH was all the really wanted in life, and not the hot pursuit of commodity;

* recognized that the alternative life of consumerism is a fantasy that cannot persist:

   How they are destroyed in a moment,
   swept away utterly by terrors!
   They are like a dream when one awakes;
   on awakening you despise their phantoms ...
   Whom have I in heaven but you?
   And there is nothing on earth that I desire other
   than you [vv 18-25].

This is a most remarkable claim that is made through the Psalter. A nervous kind of Protestant critique of excessively high cultic presence needs to be taken seriously. My wont is to come to this kind of wording, not metaphysically, but dramatically. The temple is the place of the alternative pageant, street theater that enacts a mode of reality that stands in deep contrast to dominant reality. The protection of a safe place for alternative hope is crucial for the maintenance of a vibrant faith, for faith and hope are profoundly unlike dominant culture that is so much sustained by infidelity and despair. The reason one cannot worship as well on a golf course is that the golf course is a function of dominant culture with its thin ideas of neighborliness and humanity. Thus entry into the temple is an act of resistance to all such dominant claims: a simple, lean, alternative focus in which dramatically, by word and gesture, the Wholly Other One meets us with the gift of life. The reduction of concrete hope to generic optimism permits a disregard of temple presence. But of course, generic optimism has nothing to do with this God, nothing with the gospel, and nothing with faith.

Finally I want to comment on 1 Kings 8, a sustained reflection on temple theology. This is the great liturgy of Solomon's temple dedication. In vv 2-13, there is a simple, one-dimensional statement of YHWH's presence in the temple, a rather unreflective statement. Then in v 27, there is a reflective acknowledgment that the temple cannot contain the holiness of God. Finally, in vv 28-30, there is a subtle recognition that YHWH is in heaven and not in the temple, but YHWH's name dwells there, and YHWH's eyes are incessantly attentive to the temple. These theologians are worried, in good Protestant fashion, about reducing God to a liturgical automaton, and so they introduce a mediating strategy.

What interests us, however, is that the temple is said to be, not a place of presence, but a place of forgiveness granted by the God who dwell, not in the temple, but in heaven:

   Hear the plea of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray
   toward this place; O hear in heaven your dwelling place; heed and forgive
   [1 Kgs 8:30; see vv 32, 33-34, 39].

Thus the tradition moves away from the more concrete notions of presence to the liturgical, juridical task of forgiveness. In a certain way, that is lesser. But because our theme is hope, we need to consider the cruciality of temple forgiveness for hope. By temple forgiveness I mean liturgically accomplished pardon, relief from the past, an unburdening. This text suggests that the forgiveness of the past is precisely what makes entry into the future possible. That strange moment of reconciliation cannot be accomplished amorphously but belongs to the offer of concrete, disciplined, stylized immediacy. It is the unburdened who may travel light into God's future. The temple apparatus, so these texts attest, is the occasion for such "lightness of being."

The Great Lived Fissure of the First Testament

Finally concerning the resources that Israel brings to the practice of hope, I want to comment on the great lived fissure of the First Testament. I refer to the destruction of Jerusalem, the loss of centered presence and the deportation of leading members of the community into the hostile environment of the Babylonian Empire (see Klein; Smith). It is impossible to overstate the psychological, emotional, theological emergency of the exile for the community. With the loss of city, king, temple, and ark, Israel was now bereft of any visible support for faith. The problem was political with the loss of a state identity and the leverage that comes with a state. More than that, the loss was theological, for the loss meant YHWH's abandonment of this people and the nullification of all old promises of presence. The first question asked, our question, was, "How did this happen?" But the second, more urgent question is, "Is there now any future? Is there any serious, reliable ground for hope?"

There was every reason to give up, Israel could say with the grieving poet of Lamentations:

   Gone is my glory,
   and all that I had hoped for from the Lord [Lam 3:18].

The most amazing theological reality in the First Testament, as far as I know, is this: The deportation as a matrix ripe for despair became instead a generative arena for daring hope. We do not know how this came about. We only are the happy recipients of this astonishing literature of affirmation that is commonly understood as a daring theological response of hope to a matrix of despair. It is quite clear that the three characteristic cases that I will cite are shaped and informed by very different theological traditions, so that this act of hope is pluralistic, or we may even say, ecumenical. What they all have in common, however, is that they share the conviction that YHWH, in the abyss of abandonment that constitutes the exile (the First Testament metaphor that comes closest to the defeat wrought by death), is able to do a wholly new thing. That wholly new thing is imagined and voiced under many different images. Its concrete, embodied manifestation is the emergence of Judaism, the formation of a fresh community of passionate Jewishness that understands itself as the creation of God's own determined generosity, and as the obedient partner of YHWH in covenant.

These poets, voices of hope, utter futures in a context where there was no evidence for newness (see von Rad: 188-277; Brueggemann 1986). That of course is how hope works. It is the determined anticipation of what is not yet seen.

First, Jeremiah is an exilic voice of hope. The book of Jeremiah is, for the most part, a long, painful meditation upon loss. But there are grouped in chapters 29-33 an amazing collage of oracles of possibility on the lips of YHWH. I will mention only a few examples of this poetry of covenant. First a prose passage:

   For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your
   welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you
   call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for
   me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you
   find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you
   from alt the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the
   Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into
   exile [29:11-14].

But then in poetry:

   Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,
   and declare it in the coastlands far away;
   say, "He who scattered Israel will gather him,

   and will keep him as a shepherd a flock."
   For the Lord has ransomed Jacob,
   and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.

   They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,
   and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord,
   over the grain, the wine, and the oil,
   and over the young of the flock and herd;
   their life shall become like a watered garden,
   and they shall never languish again.
   Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,
   and the young men and the old shall be merry.
   I will turn their mourning to joy,
   I will comfort them and give them gladness for sorrow,
   I will give the priests their fill of fatness,
   and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty,
   says the Lord [31:10-14].

The sketch is of an idyllic restored order of peace, plenty, and well-being. And most familiarly:

   I will be their God and they shall be my people ... for I will forgive
   their iniquity and remember their sin no more [31:33-34].

This famous oracle contrasts old covenant broken and new relationship assured. The new relationship is not individualistic as is often suggested, nor is it a move beyond Israel to a Christian "New Testament" (Lohfink). It is rather a new covenantal relationship that is now marked by a complete willingness and responsiveness of covenant obedience; it is, moreover, deeply rooted in forgiveness: the forgiveness we have seen in temple context in 1 Kings 8 that is the tap root of Israel's new beginning. Jeremiah is informed and empowered by old Mosaic memories of Sinai, and he knows that God so wills a relationship that it will be restored, repaired, and reenacted.

In a very different idiom, Ezekiel deep in the exile considers the future that God will work for Israel. By his complex vision of wheels within wheels (chapter 1), this priestly poet has been able to assert that the mobile God has come to be with the deported community in exile. That situation of deportation is not a permanent status. There will be a restoration to Jerusalem as a safe, prosperous, peaceable place. It is promised!

In chapter 34:11-16, YHWH promises now, in the light of the failure of the kings to provide adequate care, to be the pastoral caretaker of the city of Jerusalem:

   I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down,
   says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed,
   and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat
   and the strong I will destroy; I will fed them with justice [Ezek
   34:15-16].

That remarkable assertion is paralleled in the more familiar version of the valley of dry bones in chapter 37. The questioin the Lord puts to the prophet is, "Shall these bones live?" that is, does this community have a future? The prophet imagines the blowing of God's creative winds to give new life, that is, resurrection:

   Negatively: They say:
   Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off
   completely [v 11].

   Positively: Thus says the Lord God:
   I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your
   graves, O my people [v 12a].

And then the metaphor is decoded:

   I will bring you back to the land of Israel, and you shall know that I am
   the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my
   people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will
   place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have
   spoken and will act, says the Lord [vv 12b-14].

The metaphor sounds like life-after-death. The decoding, however, is concrete, communal, this-worldly, concerning "your own soil." This is life-after-exile. YHWH creates a new, safe habitat for the community that has suffered deep dislocation and humiliation.

The great vision of Ezekiel about the new habitat is in Ezekiel 40-48. What the prophet hopes for is in fact the restoration of the temple and the indwelling of YHWH's holiness in the core and center of life. This accent is very different from that of Jeremiah. Ezekiel comes out of the priestly traditions that believe that the abiding and invasive force of YHWH's own sovereign presence is what is needed and surely given, so that the future is not an empty, flat profanation. This is indeed the gift of presence about which the temple Psalms have spoken, a new ordering in the world, centered in a palpable holiness.

Third and most familiar to us, is the hope-filled rhetoric of Isaiah 40-55, known to us from Handel's Messiah. Whereas Jeremiah was covenant and Ezekiel was temple, this Isaiah is fully Jerusalem, the city, the place of presence and then of absence, the place of loss and now the place of yearning. In the imagination of this poet, the city of Jerusalem itself has been deported and is alienated from itself. And then this:

   Comfort, o comfort my people, says your God.
   Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
   that she has served her term,
   that her penalty is paid,
   that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her
   sins [40:1-2].

This is a good word to the city in exile. The word is forgiveness. The word is about leaving all that is old and failed and despairing, to receive what God will now give. And what will God give?

   Get you up to high mountain,
   O Zion, herald of good tidings;
   lift up your voice with strength,
   O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
   lift it up, do not fear,
   say to the cities of Judah,
   "Here is your God" [40:99].

Here is your God! God will give God's own self. God will be actively, vigorously back in play, precisely where it had seemed God would never be again. The phase herald of good tidings is "gospel" (see Brueggemann 1993: 14-47). The gospel announcement is that the power of the God of all newness is breaking into a failed situation to give new life. The gospel is the news that God will come to the exiles, that God will come against Babylon who is the negating power of death in this horizon. Thus the concreteness of life and death are palpably present in the situation of empire and exile. There would be no future, except for this future-generating God who acts beyond all expectations and despite circumstance.

The promise is rich and full for this Israel. I will mention only two motifs that concern our general theme. First, the poet announces what scholars call "salvation oracles," "utterances on God's own lips assuring of presence, advocacy that summons Israel to boldness and joy (see Miller: 135-77):

   But you, Israel, my servant,
   Jacob, whom I have chosen ...
   do not fear, for I am with you,
   do not be afraid, for I am your God [41:8-9].

   Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
   I have called you by name, you are mine....
   Do not fear, for I am with you;
   I will bring your offspring from the east,
   and from the west I will gather you [43:1-5].

   Do not fear, or be afraid;
   have I not told you from of old and declared it?
   You are my witnesses!
   Is there any god besides me?
   There is no other rock; I know not one [44:8].

The do not fear of YHWH is designed to veto fear. The reason that fear must be vetoed is that fearful people become faithless people and will eventually permit the deathliness of Babylon to define their future. They will succumb to the power of death. The point of do not fear is the conviction of faith that it is YHWH and not Babylon who rules the future. Babylon cannot have its way in the future, except by intimidation that takes from us our capacity to trust our lives to the future-creating God.

Second, in 52:11-12 and 55:12-13, the poet envisions homecoming, the very homecoming the exiles so longed for and that Babylon was determined to prevent (see Buechner):

   For you shall not go out in haste,
   and you shall not go in flight;
   for the Lord will go before you,
   and the God of Israel will be your rear guard [52:11-12].

   For you shall go out in joy,
   and be led back in peace;
   the mountains and the hills before you
   shall burst into song,
   and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands [55:12].

The future YHWH now announces, against Jewish despair and against Babylonian hegemony, a homecoming. But it is not to the old home. It is all new, all renovated, all healed, all made safe, all peaceable, all abundant, all fully ruled by YHWH. Indeed, this is God's rule come on earth--in the poetry--as it has been in heaven. This hope is deeply, radically new, but concretely given in the public process. Because of the God of all newness, Israel is on its way home.

I must of course add an addendum to this great force of hope in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. The realities are short of the hopes. These hopes are not fully enacted, not adequately satisfied, not made visible. As it always does, this community of hope takes the future God gives, a modest restored Jerusalem in the emergence of Judaism, and then hopes even beyond that newness, hopes for better newness not yet given, hopes for greater newness from the God of all newness.

The Presence of Hope

Now you may conclude that I have taken an inordinately long time in these preliminaries, but of course I have done so deliberately. I have wanted, as best I can, to make the insistence that hope in the First Testament is not a simple straight-line act. It is rather a conviction of faith that is deeply embodied in remarkable memories, that is shaped according to peculiar rhetoric, that is placed institutionally in a special zone of presence, and that is generated precisely in, with, and under the lived reality of fissure. Hope as a theological act cannot be extracted from this embedded, shaped, placed, lived reality. Hope is not something on the surface of faith, but is a habit of utterance and living that is situated deep in the fabric of the Israelite community and that is carried by cadences that are peculiar and distinctive.

This book, the First Testament, out of these concrete realities, is a document that offers the newness of God, newness that may take Jewish, Christian, or some other form. Those who want to join this act of expectation must take the disciplined trouble of nameable miracles from the past, of concrete speech practiced loudly,, of freighted places that go deep into the fissure of life of this community. Hope is a deep process and not an easy or natural impulse. It counts on God, but this is the God known in remembering, speaking, trusting, and suffering.

As a transitional comment, I take the word of Paul:

   Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and
   character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us [Rom 5:3].

The hope practiced in the First Testament is not lean or in a vacuum, but emerges in the presence of suffering, endurance, and character.

So consider this matrix of hope:

* A memory of miracles,

* A rhetoric of protest,

* a locus of presence, and

* a fissure of loss.

Personality Rooted in Hope

What a place in which to hope! The question I want to ask is, what kinds of persons in what kinds of communities would this kind of matrix produce? That is, hope is not a formula, but it is a practice, a habit, a way of being. I suggest three marks of persons who are formed in such a loaded context.

First, the infrastructure of miracle/protest/presence/loss produces persons of courage, those who are not intimidated or easily talked out of their passion, but who hold to this passion about the future in the face of Jerusalemite despair and in the face of Babylonian negation and oppressiveness. Such courage might lead to frontal assertiveness, but it need not. It might lead to a deep and quiet persistence that is unflappable, that is not beaten by circumstance, because there is a deep, well-grounded conviction about what must be and what will be by the resolve of God.

Second, the infrastructure of miracle/protest/presence/loss authorizes persons of hope precisely when circumstance prefers persons of despiar and alienation who are hopeless, because hopeless persons are less cantankerous, less troublesome, and more easily administered. Hope in the first place is a clear vision of how it must be and surely will be, and these poets I have cited offer scenarios of how it will surely be. But hope is not so future-focused that it flees the present. Along with a vision, hope is enacted present-tense behavior congruent with the vision, acting now on what will be then.

The clearest, most vivid example of that defying hope known to me is in Daniel 3:16-18. In the nearrative the three Judeans: Shadrack, Meshach, and Abednego, are compelled by Nebuchadnezzar to bow down to him, surely an act that would have submitted them to the hopelessness of the empire. They are urged to bow down under the dire threat that if they do not bow down, they will be consigned to the flames, an early form of the killing ovens! The purpose is to intimidate them, rob them of their resolve, and so force abasement. Their response, however, is an act of hope lined with courage:

   O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to present a defense to you in this
   matter. If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of
   blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not,
   be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will
   not worship the golden statue that you have set up.

The response is a Catch-22 for the Babylonian king, and he recognizes it immediately. He cannot win. First, they are completely confident that YHWH will deliver them. They know that YHWH is a lively character who will defeat the Babylonians. But then second, as a maddening qualifier, even without deliverance, there will be no submission to the empire. After the great hope of YHWH's deliverance, their fall-back position is a courageous "nevertheless." It is no wonder that the king of Babylon is "filled with rage," for their courageous hope means he has no power over them. Such is the quality of faith that knows that God presides over all futures, including those that Nebuchadnezzar thinks he controls.

Third, the infrastructure of miracle/protest/presence/loss produces persons of deep and sustained obedience, the awareness that the more immediate imperatives, such as those of Nebuchadnezzar, have no force, no authority or credibility. That is, those who live their life in this habitat of miracle and protest know who they are because they know whose they are. The one to whom they belong has commanded them to conform to his will, and they are glad to do so. The command under which they stand is not a closed set of rules, but it is a resolve about the future that can be coded only proximately in commands. This obedience--this walk to a different drummer--is an act of freedom and joy when what is commanded and what is desired converge completely. This is an obedience under forgiveeness that refuses what is past and resists what is present for the sake of what will yet be given by God.

This obedience, undertaken in unqualified gladness, is an immense emancipation from all other rules. In the First Testament, such hope-filled obedience need not conform to the brick quotas of Pharaoh or be intimidated by the fierceness of Nebuchadnezzar. In the Second Testament, the same hope-filled obedience is offered as discipleship to those wearied of lesser obediences:

   Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I
   will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am
   gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my
   yoke is easy, and my burden is light [Matt 11:28-30].

Hope as a World View

Finally I come to what I suppose is the proper topic of this essay: what do these courageous, hopeful, obedient persons in a community of miracle/protest/presence/loss anticipate? In sum, Israel asserts that God will, in God's way, in God's time, establish God's good rule over all recalcitrant forces and powers in the earth. That is, Israel's hope is that God will be fully God. I will comment on that thesis under three themes.

First, the most prominent and recurrent theme is that in the face of alienation, separation, and abandonment, Israel hopes for companionship and community. This is the most characteristic expectation with which the complaint Psalms end: namely, glad doxology for restored community. This is the pervasive conviction of Israel in its singing that comes in the familiar cadences of Paul:

   For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor
   things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depths,
   nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love
   of God (in Christ Jesus our Lord) [Rom 8:38-39].

Israel of course does not include the Christological phrasing at the end, but it can make the same claim. This confidence is expressed in the present tense in Psalm 23:4:

   Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
   I fear no evil;
   for you are with me;
   your rod and your staff--
   they comfort me.

The same conviction is voiced as hope:

   One thing I asked of the Lord,
   that will I seek after;
   to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
   to behold the beauty of the Lord,
   and to inquire in his temple....
   I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord
   in the land of the living.
   Wait for the Lord;
   be strong, and let your heart take courage;
   wait for the Lord! [Ps 27:4, 13-14; see Ps 73:24-26].

Note that the language is stylized; it is the unadorned awareness that being with is our deepest longing matched by the deepest confidence that nothing, not the powers of negation, not the power of death, can disrupt this companionship that is rooted in God's own commitment. The mood is much like that of St. Augustine's famous dictum, "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you."

Second, dialectically related and substantively linked to this hope is a cosmic claim that matches the more intimate hope for companionship. In its liturgy of creation and flood, Israel knows that the creation is ordered but fragilely so, can be undone and disordered as quickly as it has been ordered. Israel knows, moreover, that the ordering of the earth is in the hands of the creator. As this arrangement becomes failed or void of possibility, Israel's lyrical faith can affirm that YHWH can reorder this world, indeed can make a new one. The new world, where YHWH's will is established, will be as it is intended by YHWH to be:

   The time is surely coming, says the Lord,
   when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps,
   and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed;
   the mountains shall drip sweet wine,
   and alll the hills shall flow with it [Amos 9:13].

   The wolf shall live with the lamb,
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
   the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
   and a little child shall lead them.
   The cow and the bear shall graze,
   their young shall lie down together;
   and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
   The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
   and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.
   They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;
   for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord,
   as the waters cover the sea [Is 11:6-9; see 65:17-25].

The world will not endure as it is. Israel is not worried or anxious or fearful about it, because the God who holds the world does a new thing, a new world.

Third, in the context of intimate longing for communion and the cosmic claim of world newness, Israel diffidently imagines the full defeat of death when new life becomes fully possible. In only two or three cases does Isrel bring the immensity of its conviction about YHWH to this particular question. In Isaiah 25:7 death is imaged as a devouring monster who is in turn devoured by YHWH:

   He will swallow up death forever.
   Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
   and the disgrace of his people he will take away from
   all the earth.

In Isaiah 26:19, likely related to and derivative from 25:7-8, the full investment of YHWH is anticipated, when the dead shall live by the power of God:

   Your dead shall live,
   their corpses shall rise.
   O dwellers in the dust,
   awake and sing for joy!
   For your dew is a radiant dew,
   and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

And in Daniel 12:2, that hope is more differentiated in judgment:

   Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to
   everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

That is all. The ideas are inchoate in the First Testament, and Israel refuses to speculate. Its confidence is in God, and life for the world and for the person will follow as it may follow from the reality of God. Of particular relevance here is the quite distinctive work of Mitchell Dahood, who in a dating departure from the scholarly consensus has proposed that immortality of life, beyond death, is indeed offered in a variety of the Psalms (see also Bart). Very much turns on his translations, and he has not been much followed by other interpreters. His data, however, are there, and need to be considered in our continued reflection on the question.

Quite clearly, in every aspect of such radical hope beyond what we are able to see and control is a God-centered hope. There is no hint that the human "soul" possesses any durable quality of its own. There is no hint of going to another place in death. It is all gift, free, large, inexplicable gift from God. But then, that is what saturates all of Israel's confidence about the future: it is all of God. It was not a difficult linguistic turn to transpose rule of God into kingdom of heaven; but it is a mischievous translation and we are better left looking to God (and not the environs of heaven), attentive to the political phrasing of the kingdom. It is a hope here and wherever, now and whenever, that God will be utterly God. More need not be said.

Israel in the First Testament refuses speculation. Be. yond this I want only to stress that Israel's hope is not an escape or an alternative to the present. It is rather a resource for a different obedience in the present, on the basis of confidence in God's future. Hope as obedience is a resistance to much of the present. It is the great "nevertheless" that energizes and emancipates. Thus Habakkuk concludes:

   Though the fig tree does not blossom,
   and no fruit is on the vines;
   though the produce of the olive fails
   and the field yields no food;
   though the flock is cut off from the fold
   and there is no herd in the stalls,
   yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
   I will exult in the God of my salvation [3:17-18].

Though, though, though ... yet! Yet, indeed!

Works Cited

Blumenthal, David R. 1993. FACING THE ABUSIVE GOD: A THEOLOGY OF PROTEST. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Brueggemann, Walter. 1991. ABIDING ASTONISHMENT: PSALMS, MODERNITY, AND THE MAKING OF HISTORY. Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

1986. HOPEFUL IMAGINATION: PROPHETIC VOICES IN EXILE. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.

1984. THE MESSAGE OF THE PSALMS. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing Home.

Gerstenberger, Erhard. 1971. Der Klagende Mensch. Pp. 64-72 in PROBLEME BIBLISGHER THEOLOGIE, ed. Hans Walter Wolff. Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag.

Klein, Ralph W. 1979. ISRAEL IN EXILE: A THEOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION (OBT; Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.

Lindstrom, Fredrik. 1994. SUFFERING AND SIN: INTERPRETATIONS OF ILLNESS IN THE INDIVIDUAL COMPLAINT PSALMS. CONIECTANEA BIBLICA, Old Testament Series, n. 37. Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell International.

Miller, Patrick D. 1995. Creation and Covenant. Pp. 155-68 in BIBLICAL THEOLOGY: PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES, ed. Steven J. Kraftchick et al. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.

1994. THEY CRIED TO THE LORD: THE FORM AND THEOLOGY OF BIBLICAL PRAYER. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Mullen, Jr., E.T. 1980. THE DIVINE COUNCIL IN CANAANITE AND EARLY HEBREW LITERATURE. Chico, CA: Scholars Press.

Ollenburger, Ben G. 1987. ZION THE CITY OF THE GREAT KING: A THEOLOGICAL SYMBOL OF THE JERUSALEM CULT. JSOT SUPP., n. 41; Sheffield, UK: Sheffield, Acadaemic Press.

Smith, Daniel L. 1989. THE RELIGION OF THE LANDLESS; THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE BABYLONIAN EXILE. Indianapolis, IN: Meyer Stone Books.

von Rad, Gerhard. 1965. OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY II. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.

Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. 1982. ZAKHOR: JEWISH HISTORY AND JEWISH MEMORY. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

Walter Brueggemann, Th.D. (Union Theological Seminary, New York) is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, P. O. Box 520, Decatur, GA 30031). He is author of several recent works, including TEXTS UNDER NEGOTIATION: THE BIBLE AND POSTMODERN IMAGINATION (Fortress, 1993), BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVES ON EVANGELISM: LIVING IN A THREE-STORIED UNIVERSE (Abingdon, 1993), and OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY: ESSAYS ON STRUCTURE, THEME, AND TEXT (Fortress, 1992). His article, Suffering Produces Hope, appeared in BTB 28:95-103.