Scripture: Micah 4:1-4; Mark 7:24-37

“He (God) will wield authority over many peoples and arbitrate for mighty nations; they will hammer their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, there will be no more training for war. Each man will sit under his vine and his fig tree, with no one to trouble him.”

-- Micah 4:3 (JB)

Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah of Jerusalem in the southern kingdom, and of Amos and Hosea in the northern kingdom. He is the fourth of the quartet of great 8th century BC prophets and our treatment of him completes our study of biblical prophecy in that period. The later prophets of the 6th century, Second Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel must wait until next summer, and we have much to look forward to when we resume our customary summer series on OT themes. Micah shares many of the views of his fellow prophets. For instance the passage from which our quoted text comes also appears, word for word, in Isaiah 2:2-4, and the theme of the Remnant we examined last week in Isaiah is also prominent in Micah (4-5).

We might imagine Micah and Isaiah passing on a Jerusalem street, but probably not meeting, because of a wide social gulf between them. Isaiah was an aristocrat and Micah a peasant. Isaiah might have looked with fastidious distaste on the dusty peasant, while Micah responded with scorn of the soft, smooth urbanite. The editors of the JB say of Isaiah’s Hebrew prose,  “…he wrote a concise, majestic and harmonious prose unsurpassed by any of the biblical writers who were to follow him.” Of Micah they say, “Being of peasant extraction he has much in common with Amos: suspicion of city life, concrete and at time coarse expression, a taste for swift strokes of imagery and for play on words.” “Majestic and harmonious,” “concrete and coarse” perhaps describe the two characters as much as their style. So we have the opportunity to compare two contemporary prophets from different social circles, one a city centered aristocrat and the other, an anti-city peasant. Unfortunately, we do not have time to spell out the comparison so I must leave that to your private reading and move on to consider Micah’s message itself.

The passage we quote must have been relatively common in the political and religious speech of the period because it occurs in the written record of the two prophets. Whatever its provenance it is a vision of what Jesus, with some important changes, later called the “Kingdom of God.” Swords will become ploughshares and spears sickles, every man will be content to sit untroubled under his own vine and fig tree and not go looking for trouble, and we shall study war no more. The most important change that Jesus made was to detach the vision of universal peace from Zion. As it stands the oracle is a piece of ancient Zionist propaganda. Peace comes when all the nations go up to mount Zion and accept the Law of the God of Israel. This is the part that Jesus and his early followers emphatically excised. Indeed, according to Jesus it is not the nations that come to Zion but Zion that goes to the nations and disappears in the universal love of God for all humanity, summarized so powerfully by St Paul when he says in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ the distinctions between Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free are erased, that discrimination based on differences of ethnicity, gender, and social standing are passé. The failure to read passages like this through the eyes of Jesus, a failure characteristic of fundamentalism, has created in our time the phenomenon of Christian Zionism. One of its champions, Jerry Falwell, proclaims that “the American Bible belt is Israel’s safety belt,” as he flies around the world in a jet provided by Israeli interests.

Let us ask what it might have been that caused these four great prophets to emerge at the same time, and later caused the three great 6th century prophets (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Second Isaiah) to appear together in their time. Why did they come together at the same time and why did people record their words in writing? The one variable that I can think of is war. Both groups of prophets appeared when the continuance of the state was in jeopardy because of war. In the 8th century the northern kingdom disappeared under the Assyrian onslaught and in the 6th century the southern kingdom succumbed to the Chaldeans of Babylon, and these were the times when God raised up great prophets. The crisis of war called them forth, and because their warnings and condemnations were ignored the horrors they prophesied came to pass.  In brief, they were all anti-war. The unanimous testimony of the prophetic tradition is against war as an instrument of policy

Where are the prophets today when our nation is dominated by the theme of war? We are in an endless war against terrorism, like the erstwhile cold war. We made a big mistake in calling our response to 9/11 a war. Britain does not call its fight against the IRA a war, neither does Spain  its fight against the ETA. It is as if most of us cannot feel satisfied unless we are at war. We love our armed forces and eat up accounts of their prowess. Our president prances around in uniform and Karl Rove the president’s premier political advisor says that the theme of his election campaign must be war. You can imagine what the image makers will do next September when Bush gives his acceptance speech right there in lower Manhattan as near as the Republican convention can get to where the 9/11 event took place. War alone, Rove argues, will take our minds off the steep increases in the jobless figures, the zooming fiscal deficits and the crushing, humiliating failure of the Iraq war policy and the Israel–Palestine road map to nowhere. Consider the fiscal deficits alone; today China is propping us up by buying our bonds, thus keeping our long-term interest rates more or less down, for the present. For that reason we cannot afford to be tough with China on any subject, especially not on the value of their currency, which is at present under discussion. So our militarist foreign policy dominated by a war on terrorism is now in thrall not only to the Zionists and the Saudi religious fascists but also to the Chinese Communists, while estranged from our traditional allies Germany and France, and thus unilateralist militarism makes us less and less independent.

Where are the prophets today? What would such prophets say if they were to appear? Perhaps they would say the same as Micah said. One of Micah’s oracles was so well known that it was quoted a hundred years later in defense of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was on trial for his life because he had prophesied the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, that is, he had disagreed with the house prophets of the government saying that their war policy would lead to the destruction of Jerusalem. I quote Jeremiah 26:16-19: “The officials and all the people then said to the priests and prophets, ‘This man does not deserve to die: he has spoken to us in the name of Yahweh our God.’ Some of the elders of the land had risen to address all the assembled people. ‘Micah of Moresheth,’ they said, ‘who prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, had this to say to all the people of Judah,’ ‘Yahweh says this, Zion will become plough land, Jerusalem a heap of rubble, and the mountain of the Temple a wooded height.’ Did Hezekiah king of Judah put him to death for this? Did they not rather, fearing Yahweh, entreat his favor, to make him relent and not bring the disaster on them, which he had pronounced against them? Are we now to burden our souls with such a crime?’” The oracle quoted in Jeremiah’s defense occurs in Micah 3:12 at the climax of a denunciation of the government of his own time for injustice, cruelty, and high crimes in high places, for officials bought and paid for by special interests, judges who are politically partisan, clergy who are venal and cowardly, “And yet they rely on Yahweh. They say, ‘Is not Yahweh in our midst? No evil is going to overtake us.’ Because of this, since the fault is yours, Zion will become like a plough land etc.” (3:11-12). Someone should say this kind of thing to those running our country at present.    

Micah also sounds a more positive note. In chapter 5:1-3 he speaks of one who will be born in Bethlehem, (Ephrathah), into the least of the clans of Judah, who will rule the Remnant that returns to faith in God, who will “stand and feed his flock with the power of the Lord… They will live secure, for from then on he will extend his power to the ends of the land. He himself will be peace. He will deliver us from Assyria should it invade our country, should it set foot inside our frontiers.”

In the mean time we must behave faithfully. Micah gave us one of the most powerful summaries of the prophetic message to describe what this faithful living might look like. “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (6:6-8 RSV).” What precisely is Micah saying here?

Firstly he repudiates the ritual substitutes for real life. God does not want ritual he wants reality, he does not want the objects of ritual sacrifice, cattle, oil, even first-born sons, ritually destroyed as a way of expressing our devotion to God. Rather than ritual sacrifice, rather than formal religion, God wants the real thing, a life of justice, kindness, and humility, lived in the every day world and not play acted in the theater of the Temple. Micah’s God knows, as we do, that many of the most pious and observant people are also the cruelest and crookedest players in the real world. Hypocrisy is the glue of religion and we have often to leave the churches if we wish to live decent, honest lives and not associate with scoundrels.

The first word in Micah’s exhortation, mishpat, is the word for the quality of a society that is fair to all and does not deprive or exploit the weak to enhance the already strong even more, does not give tax breaks to the rich who can afford private schools while the education systems for the ordinary folk fall apart, that does not send the people’s money on hare-brained military adventures abroad, while the needs at home pile up unattended. The second word, hesed, is characteristic of Hosea, and expresses the faithfulness of a lover who is not deterred by rejection, primarily the faithfulness of God to his covenant with us, the God who perseveres in doing good to those who reject him. Micah wants us to love this kind of fidelity, to love the covenant with God and one another. Finally, Micah wants us to walk humbly with God. I wonder when last there was a humble USA. Our president said when he was running for office that a great power that behaved humbly would lead the world effectively. Then 9/11 happened and humility went up in smoke, to be replaced by panicked arrogance. Let me not comment further on the sharp irony of an arrogance that claims God is in the midst of our corruption and cruelty, while we have no trust in God, but rather play out a video-game scenario of military force and panicked indignation.

Can we live justly, loving kindness, because we are in a covenant with God and all creatures, and walking humbly? I wonder. We can, I believe, if we really believe in the one whom Micah said is Peace itself, the one born in Bethlehem, and rely utterly on his enabling grace. Such commitment would have to be prophetic in Micah’s sense of radically self-critical if it were to succeed, otherwise it could turn out to be just more of the corruption of those “KKKristians” who bray about loving Jesus while they encourage the elimination of Muslims and liberals. Such faith would begin with self-criticism, and move on to justice, kindness, and humility before God. It would above all be honest, about the lies and corruption that beset us as individuals, and that beset our present poverty stricken culture. It would be a determined, enlightened and honest attempt to live the real Christian life in the real world, to serve Christ rather than having him serve us, to enlist ourselves in his cause rather than to co-opt him to ours, to let him be Peace rather than to make him War, to be crucified with Christ so that we might eventually be raised with him, to worship the Cross rather than to use it as a weapon of war.