The Prophetic Imagination - Part 8

When Jesus is warned that Herod wants to kill him, he says, ‘Oh Jerusalem Jerusalem you who stone the prophets and kill those sent to you.’ Jesus recognizes that Herod is the most recent iteration of a long history of Israel’s leaders defending themselves from people like him in order to maintain the status quo.

Matthew’s gospel tells us that Herod had all the baby boys in Bethlehem two and under put to death. Mark and Luke tell similar gruesome stories about Herod. George Orwell says: ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible’, and Herod was the indefensible status quo of Israel. When faced with a choice between Herod or Jesus, Israel’s leaders went with Herod. They had to narrate their reality so that they could make peace with the decision.

Because language is used to defend the indefensible, Orwell explains that our ‘political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.'

Joe Biden was the chair of the special senate committee for foreign relations from 1997 to 2003. During his tenure, Biden began to advocate for the invasion of Iraq 5 years before George Bush executed the war. After Bush waged a war of aggression, Obama became president and smoothed it all over. By that time Obama felt he could drop the euphemistic language and said ‘we tortured some folks’. He went on to explain, ‘While I don’t believe that anybody is above the law, I also believe that we need to look forward instead of backwards’. Obama instructed America to put the illegal war and the torture program down the ‘memory hole’ - another Orwellian term. Obama himself would go on to start new wars, renew the patriot act, and arrest more journalists and their sources than any president to date.     

If the church is going to have a prophetic imagination, we have to be willing to break with the herd and refuse to speak the political language handed to us by the predominant culture. This may not mean success for the church in the sense of convincing others to see what we see; but the church is not called to be successful, but rather to be faithful.

 

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