As the previous section illustrates, the prophetic task of Jesus is in continuity with the tradition of Israel’s prophets. The Hebrew prophets, whom Jesus studied and read in the Torah, significantly influenced his life.434 From the Hebrew Bible, we know that the prophet was a divinely anointed person specifically chosen to teach God’s
wisdom, and to explain or interpret it to the community of faith.435 Prophecy in the Torah was not only understood as prediction, with Yahweh speaking to humans through the prophet’s spoken words; prophecy was more importantly, a way of living in the world.436 Exemplified in the account of Moses, the prophet “speaks for” God and represents God. Representing God entails the prophet’s deep, intimate knowledge of the God he serves. Abraham Heschel describes this notion as the “divine pathos.” For him, it is key to understanding Israel’s prophets:
the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos, a communion with the divine consciousness which comes about through the prophet’s reflection of, or participation in, the divine pathos…He lives not only his personal life, but also the life of God. The prophet hears God’s voice and feels His heart.
433 Hall, Professing the Faith, 411.
434 Hall writes, “Jesus has been seen in this tradition, not as an independent figure or innovator, but as
being himself the inheritor of a rich and wise tradition. His work is not a work whose outlines are already determined prior to his appearance. It is a work therefore whose necessity is already known to the prophets and lawgivers and wisdom-writers of Israel. Part of the destiny (‘cup’) of which Jesus in the newer Testamental record is clearly conscious is his calling to accept and fulfill this preconceived work.” See
Professing the Faith, 407.
435 Philibert, The Priesthood of the Faithful, 74. 436 Johnson, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church, 39-51.
logos.437
Heschel’s words are evocative of the unmistakable intimacy between Jesus and the Father, as we see in John 10:38, “the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”438 Jesus is in absolute unity with the Father, not only hearing his voice but speaking it; not only feeling his heart but acting out of it. Jesus embodies the divine pathos. Indeed, “There could be no more fitting way of summarizing the prophetic work of Jesus than through Heschel’s ‘divine pathos.’ Not in his teaching alone, his parables, his acts of healing, his
denunciations and blessings, but in his person Jesus must be seen as the inheritor of this prophetic tradition.”439
Like the Jesus-Abba relationship, the prophet-God relationship in the Hebrew Bible is marked by profound familiarity. The prophet did not grasp God as an intellectual concept. “To the prophets,” Heschel writes, “God was overwhelmingly real and
shatteringly present. They never spoke of Him from a distance. They lived as witnesses, struck by the words of God, rather than as explorers engaged in an effort to ascertain the nature of God…”440 The prophets thus continuously sensed God’s nearness and lived accordingly. Theirs was an acute awareness and a deep consciousness about God’s words and ways that were palpable in the everyday. In other words, the prophets were engaged
437 Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962), 26. Italics
original. For Heschel, pathos stands for God’s “living care... a dynamic relation between God and man; not mere feeling or passive affection, but an act or attitude...a passionate summons.” (p. 224)
438 Urban von Wahlde, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me” (John 4:34): Jesus as
Model of Vocation in the Gospel of John,” in Revisiting the Idea of Vocation: Theological Explorations, ed. J. Haughey (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 53-76 at 71. I prefer the translation von Wahlde uses: “The totality of this intimacy between Jesus and the Father is stated clearly and succinctly in [John] 10:38: ‘The Father and I are one!’ In [John] 15:32 we read, ‘but I am not alone because the Father is with me.’”
439 Hall, Professing the Faith, 413. Italics original. 440 Heschel, The Prophets, 221.
that, “together with receptivity to the word of God [the prophets] were endowed with a receptivity to the presence of God. The presence and anxiety of God spoke to them out of manifestations of history. They had an intuitive grasp of hidden meanings, of an
unspoken message.”441 This “intuitive grasp,” I argue, is the prophet’s sensus fidei – his “active sense forever on the lookout for God.”442
The sensus fidei of the Hebrew prophets has a parallel in the sensus fidei of Jesus. We recognize in Jesus, “faith in an analogous sense.”443 As we saw earlier, Jesus
persevered in prayer, which is a clear manifestation of his utter dependence and trust in the one whom he called Father. Jesus, “in other words, [had] a strong relationship of faith in God” and Gerald O’Collins argues this to be Jesus’ fides qua.444 Though Jesus’ faith is not like our faith in all its aspects, his faith, as in ours, “had its deepest roots in the most ordinary experience of everyday life.”445 Like the ancient prophets, Jesus confessed the creeds of Israel, which O’Collins describes as his fides quae. The prophets’ actions are engendered by their exercise of the sensus fidei and thus contributed to the long tradition of prophetic praxis in the Torah, which in turn Jesus learned. Through prayer and
441 Heschel, The Prophets, 222.
442 This definition of the sensus fidei is Rush’s, also mentioned in Chapter One. See The Eyes of Faith,
225.
443 Gerald O’Collins, “The Faith of Jesus,” Theological Studies 53, no. 3 (1992): 403-423 at 418. 444 O’Collins, “The Faith of Jesus,” 417. In this article, O’Collins explores Jesus’ fides qua and fides
quae, supporting my claim that Jesus had his own sense of the faith. However, O’Collins makes it clear that
“certain very important convictions did not and could not enter Jesus’ confession of faith,” namely, his divine identity (“his primordial awareness of being the unique Son of God whom he addressed as ‘Abba’”) and his saving mission (though “he could not confess his redemptive death and resurrection in the way Christians began to do so”). These, O’Collins says, “were matters of knowledge and not of faith for Jesus.” See “The Faith of Jesus,” pp. 418-419. See also Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads: A Latin
American Approach, trans. J. Drury (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1978), 79-178.
445 James Mackey, Jesus the Man and the Myth (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 171. Also in
Spirit’s gift of the sensus fidei in his life and mission as prophet. The sensus fidei also facilitates the prophet’s keen receptivity to the Word and the presence of God. This receptivity serves as the framework that shapes his or her relationship with God and with others, one that may be considered “the prophetic hermeneutic.” Such a framework aids the prophet in his or her constant striving to bring God’s vision for humanity into history.446 Jesus lived his vocation precisely out of this prophetic hermeneutic.
A prophet is introduced to and grows in the divine pathos through the sensus fidei. Embracing the divine pathos, God’s absolute concern for humanity, means that the
prophet also promotes the kind of future that God wills for all. For the prophet, the work remains unfinished until suffering, loss, grief, and judgment is transformed into the new hope-filled possibilities that God envisions for the world, because “hope is
characteristically intrinsic to the prophetic message.”447 In this particular task, the prophet exercises his sensus fidei with the help of his imagination. Walter Brueggemann argues, “It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”448 Jesus’ prophetic utterance that “the kingdom of God is at hand” was his way of presenting the possibility of a future different from the one his
contemporaries were imagining. Jesus embodied that kingdom, and thus embodied the future that God envisioned for all.
446 Johnson, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church, 44, 72 and 130. For a discussion of the role of the
prophet as hermeneut, see Chapter 8 in Boring, The Continuing Voice of Jesus, 138-154.
447 Walter Brueggemann, The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipatory Word
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 111.
448 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press,
Jewish worldview that Jesus grew out of, the eminent role of the Spirit in his life and prophetic vocation, and the influence of the prophetic tradition of Israel upon him. Prophetic Christology serves as the foundation for understanding the prophetic responsibility of the laity. This will be the focus of the next section.