Prisoners of Hope & the Prophetic Imagination of a Nonviolent State.
Jamin’s sermon on Zechariah 9 and the idea of hope has had me reflecting on our current cultural context and the role of prophetic imagination. In previous chapters, Zachariah was carrying out his prophetic duty of truth-telling and calling God’s people to repentance, then the rest of the book he cast vision and hope for God’s Kingdom. Walter Bruggemann explains the role of the prophets in The Prophetic Imagination , where the prophets have a long standing tradition of lamenting the circumstances of God’s people and casting vision and hope of the world God intends for his people. The prophets shake up the lack of imagination people have for this world through lamentation and hope.
Jesus very much embodies this prophetic tradition. His words and teachings are steeped in the Old Testament prophets, in lamentation and offering visions of hope. Just like the Old Testament prophets , his visions of hope usually flip conventional wisdom upside down. He offers living in this world in ways that don’t make sense in this world. Jesus gives us a vision of disarming violence through nonviolence, of dismantling oppression through suffering. What I find so interesting about Jesus’ nonviolence was that he wasn’t just addressing individual actions, but institutional power and oppression. The oppressive regime of the Roman Empire was at the very forefront of every Israelite’s consciousness. Because Jesus had a prophetic voice, he was considered an anti-empire dissident. Jesus was tortured and executed by the state.
In this country, we are having an urgent conversation about power, about violence, and the role of the state. It seems like we suffer from complacency and have a lack of imagination when it comes to institutional power and violence. Half a century ago, this same conversation was shaken up by the prophetic imagination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He carried out truth-telling by calling Americans to see racial inequity, he compelled us to reckon with our violent state through nonviolent civil disobedience, he cast vision of reconciled community. Our imaginations were inspired! He helped us imagine what beautiful community could be! Ultimately, he was murdered, his legacy in our national discourse was tamed, and our imagination faded. In his recent essay, Imagining the Nonviolent State , Ezra Klein is resurrecting MLK’s prophetic imagination of nonviolence, shaking up our complacency and calling us to imagine something unimaginable:
I will not pretend, in this piece, to be able to fully imagine the workings of a state that truly seeks to follow the ethos of nonviolence wherever it can. A state that practices forgiveness, that seeks change, that pursues the harmony of community rather than the false peace of incarceration. It is easy, of course, to imagine the difficulties and dangers of that path. But let us not sugarcoat the harms of the path we have chosen instead: We are a violent society surrounded by a violent state, a country that locks up more of its own than any country on earth, in which agents of the government slowly choke citizens to death while bystanders beg them to stop, leading to riots that the state then uses as an excuse to deploy yet more violence in the name of order. It is time to ask a different question, find different answers, pursue better goals.
As followers of Jesus and Kingdom-minded people, we need to listen to prophetic voices, we must be inspired by prophetic imagination. As “prisoners of hope” (Zechariah 9:9-12), we long for the beautiful community God intends for humanity, as his image-bearers. Prophetic hope informs our view of justice and compels us toward mercy. From my perspective, the heart of Christianity is Jesus’ prophetic imagination of Imago Dei. This is what I find so radical and so compelling about Christianity and its hope for our world.
-Jake Wiig
Jake Wiig is our guest blogger this week. He has been a part of our community since 2013 and works at Service Over Self. I am grateful for his thoughts in this post. -Dianne