The discussion with Daniel C. in the comments on the previous post started me thinking. The biblical prophets laid their lives on the line time after time after time because when the kings and other powerful people of their land were unrighteous, they confronted the wicked with the righteous anger of God, to their face, in the sharpest possible terms. One of the reasons I disparaged (in my old Presbyweb piece) the claims of Presbyterian liberals to be speaking prophetically is that there was no risk involved—they were merely aligning themselves with one group of powerful people against another in an interparty dispute, saying things which had been said many times before.

The same surely cannot be said of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. Any government which would turn biochemical weapons against a group of its own citizens and plan atrocities to justify policy decisions—for such and no less is what he has alleged—would never allow anyone who exposed its activities to live, at least without divine intervention. These are the sorts of things, if true, that one might expect God to reveal to one of his prophets. If the Rev. Dr. Wright’s accusations are in fact prophetic revelations from God, then they’re justified. If not, then he’s a false prophet. Given that we know how AIDS entered this country, courtesy of Randy Shilts (who bears particular responsibility for publicizing the story of Gaëtan Dugas, the French-Canadian flight attendant who was one of those who brought the virus here from Africa), I’d say that test doesn’t look too good for Sen. Obama’s pastor.

At first blush, he would seem to look better on the test of boldness; certainly he pulls no punches in his language. Where he fails, however, is in his location. Jonah went (under protest, of course) to Nineveh; Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos and many others went into the court of the king. True prophets, when they have a condemnation to announce, do so in the presence of the one whom they are condemning, setting aside all earthly safety, trusting God to get them out. (Or not, as the case may be; tradition has it that Manasseh had Isaiah sawed in half inside a hollow log.) Put another way, true prophets speak to “us.” The Rev. Dr. Wright, by contrast, denounced “them.” He failed the test.

There’s a deeper significance to this as well: denouncing “them” tells “us” that “we” are free to believe what we want to believe, both about ourselves and about “them”—and that’s not something God’s prophets do. Judgment begins in the house of God, and so that’s where his prophets begin: by challenging and rebuking us. Before they let us pronounce the judgment of God on our enemies, they call us to pronounce it on ourselves—to fall to our knees in repentance for our sin and to rise in humble awareness of our fallenness, and our desperate need for grace. In so doing, they bring us to a place where we would be just as happy to see the repentance of our enemies as their obliteration.

The problem with self-anointed prophets is they don’t stand in that place, because they don’t have that humility. As I wrote in 2005, to folks like that,

the rest of the world divides into two camps: the righteous (those who agree with me) and the unrighteous (those who don’t), which leaves only the question, “What fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Belial?” There in a nutshell is the state of things . . . for too many folks, the presence of people who disagree with us, instead of serving as an opportunity for learning and self-correction, merely hardens us in our own positions, because “we” are light and “they” are darkness. This wouldn’t be a problem for someone whose life and beliefs were already 100% in accordance with the will of God, but that isn’t any of us; we all have areas where we need to grow, and beliefs (sometimes cherished ones) which are simply wrong, and we can’t afford to set those in stone. . . . [We] need to set aside this self-aggrandizing nonsense that we’re speaking “prophetically,” which sets us above those with whom we disagree, and learn instead to approach them in a spirit of humility and grace. Our motives and vision just aren’t pure enough to justify doing things any other way.

The day after Jesus’ crucifixion must, in some ways, have been the hardest day of the disciples’ lives. For the rest of Jerusalem, the world was back to normal after the commotion of the three crucifixions; their fellow Jews would be getting up and going to the synagogue to observe the Sabbath, some of them probably with a sense of satisfaction that that Galilean gadfly was out of the way. For Jesus’ disciples, however, the reality and enormity of their loss was just beginning to sink in, and the world would never be back to normal; it would never be right again. Oh, they would adjust in time, learn to go on—but life would never be the same. Saturday was an empty day, all the color in life faded to a drab, dingy, depressing grey.

As such, I think Holy Saturday is a particularly important holiday for our culture, whether we pay any attention to it or not, because this is where many people in this country live. Why else is depression reaching epidemic status in America, especially among those of the younger generations? Why else could Elizabeth Wurtzel call her memoir Prozac Nation—and why else would that book have been a bestseller? Why else are our suicide rates so high? We live in a world that’s just getting by, most of the time, a world of people trying to cope with broken marriages, abusive parents, drug-addicted children, broken dreams, evaporated hopes, one failure after another . . .

I used to believe that most people sailed through life with no major hurts or disappointments, but three decades have taught me that’s an illusion; there are very few people like that, and most of those are fakes. Rather, there are a great many people in this world this morning who are standing exactly where Peter stood that Saturday: someone just pulled the rug out from under them, and they aren’t sure there’s a floor beneath their feet.

And it’s at this point, into this moment, that Easter comes. After the darkest nights in human history, in the dirty grey light of not-quite-morning, the Son of God, lying dead on a stone slab, got up; and as the Christian singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson put it, “the sound of the fiery blast of Death exploding shook the firmament.” The entire world, all of creation, lurched sideways, and the chains holding it down snapped; the grey of the day shattered in a million pieces as the Light of God blazed forth from that tomb. Hope conquered hopelessness; life overcame death; love broke the power of sin; God had the last word; and indeed, nothing would ever be the same again.

But if Easter is a light to crack the sky and blind the very stars, it’s still a light that far too many people don’t see. Perhaps they haven’t heard the message; perhaps they have only heard a distorted version of it that hides the light; but whatever the reason, they walk on in shadow. C. S. Lewis described Narnia under the reign of the White Witch as a land where it was always winter and never Christmas; for many in this world, it’s always Saturday and never Easter.

And so we see people carrying on as best they can, seeking out scraps of meaning to paper over their doubts, snaring bits of hope to give themselves a reason to keep going, snatching fragments of answers to ward off the questions that haunt and torment them; and from our cities and our towns we hear the wail of grief and the shriek of rage, the moan of pain and the cry of fear, and running through them all the sad whisper of loneliness, isolation, and alienation.

As human beings, at some deep level we need answers to the questions of why we are here and what our lives are worth, and we need the promise that someone loves us no matter what; and apart from God, this world can’t provide those. It can’t offer any resolution to the discordant voices of grief and pain, rage and fear. But over and above the discord, the thunder unleashed that first Easter continues to sound, the blast front of that explosion continues to roll over us; as Peterson says, “Throughout the wail and shudder, over the shriek and moan of man, the thunder has sounded and sung, and it is both the answer and the promise. It sings still, and you can hear what it says if you listen: love never dies.”

For the bedtime reading for our two older girls, we’re in the process of working our way through the Chronicles of Narnia; right now, we’re six chapters in on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is and always has been my favorite of the books. (Hey, I’m male, and the son of a sailor to boot, and it’s the most classically adventurish of the lot.) This evening, I was reading ahead a bit, and in chapter seven I was struck by an exchange I’d completely forgotten about:

“I think you’ve seen Aslan,” said Edmund.

“Aslan!” said Eustace. “I’ve heard that name mentioned several times since we joined the Dawn Treader. . . . But who is Aslan? Do you know him?”

“Well—he knows me,” said Edmund.”

Well—he knows me. Most of the time, it seems our focus is on whether we know God, or whether other people know God; but Jesus makes it clear that there are plenty of people who “know God” but God doesn’t know them. As my friend the Rev. Tryg Johnson has put it, if we go up to the White House and ask to be let in because we know President Bush, we can talk all day and it won’t get us anywhere; but if President Bush comes out and says, “It’s all right—I know them, they’re friends of mine,” that’s quite another matter. That we know God, if we truly do, is an important thing, yes; but the truly important question is, does God know us? And if we can say, in all honesty and assurance, that we are known by God . . . everything else is secondary to that.

From the consideration of who God is and what he’s like, the third section of my credo raises (and begins to address) the problem of evil.

Update: read the first section here, the second section here, and the third section here.