Seek ye first the kingdom of God …
Psalm 82 is among the strangest poems in the Book of Psalms; perhaps one of the more bewildering poetic passages in the Hebrew Bible altogether. And yet, more than one interpreter has intimated that it just might be “the single most important text in the entire Bible.”[1]
This ancient Israelite prayer-poem is difficult for many of the time-honored and expected reasons that people find the Hebrew Scriptures challenging to interpret. There are elements of ambiguity when it comes to the poem’s syntax, terminology, and appropriate translation; there are questions about how exactly one might categorize it within the analytic enterprise of form-criticism; there are issues associated with how influential myths and cultural conceptualities from the wider ancient Mesopotamian world seem to be reflected by the psalm’s portrayal of a divine council. And this is just to name a few.
Of course, there exists a plethora of ably written academic articles and scholarly commentaries that can provide useful guidance in addressing such matters. Beyond and underneath and alongside all of this, however, I would suggest that a big part of what makes Psalm 82 strange, and difficult, is the basic question of ontology: what is it? Is it a poem? Is it a prayer? Is it lament? Is it prophecy? Is it theology? Or do these descriptions risk limiting the poem to a mere category — a textual artifact that may be placed in the correct generic bucket for purposes of critical analysis? Is Psalm 82 some kind of invitation, a summons, or a calling, even? Or is more like an intervention, a provocation, a confrontation?
Jeremiah Webster’s recently published collection, entitled Notes for a Postlude, provokes a similar interpretive exploration. I suppose one might glance at the subtitle, “poems,” listed right there on the cover, perhaps already familiar other poems composed by the author which have been featured on this website, then roll their eyes at my overstatement of the work’s underdetermined genre. It is what it says it is. But bear with me for a moment …
The collection begins with a theological foreword by J.P. O’Connor, who will not allow the genre classification of “poetry” to limit our reception of what he calls a “deeply enriching theological exposé” (p. xvi). Immediately, the lines between theology and poetry, prosaic and imaginative accounts of God, humanity, culture, hope, and power are appropriately blurred, in the foreword just as much as in what follows. Offering a masterfully concise yet powerful sketch of what distinctive kind of God is revealed in the Christian Bible, O’Connor evokes and distills what attempts at a more comprehensive mode of biblical theology might risk nuancing unduly, or perhaps reinforcing to death. Weaving the prophetic visions of Magnificat and Apocalypse together with sketches of the faithful witness and costly discipleship of “persecuted minority groups” in the books of Daniel and Mark, he draws us into a theological tradition to which Webster’s offerings also belong and contribute. Just as Mary’s own theological prayer-poem is no mere spiritual discipline or intellectual abstraction, but rather a “song of devotion” that “takes an unmistakable political turn” (p. xii), O’Connor is priming the reader for a theological vision that will blend divine revelation with a practical “reckoning,” aesthetics with a call to faithful action.
While some forewords might be routinely bypassed or justly skimmed as merely a conventional, throat-clearing type of prolegomena, this one is best viewed as a trusted and insightful conversation partner, providing both an entrée to and also ongoing conversation partner with the poetic collection that follows.
Webster’s words then step onto the stage, not merely as a poetic embellishment, but as a kind of thesis. The title-track, “Notes for a Postlude,” plunges the reader immediately into the realm of history and theology, as Luther “and his minions of reform” are invoked as a catalyst for the silencing of mysticism, bringing about the disenchantment of a decidedly un-sacramental state of affairs that Charles Taylor has memorably dubbed the “immanent frame.” According to Webster, it is against this backdrop that a sinister and distorted “pale American” Christology threatens to rise, and the necessary antidote is “hymns of renegade” and liturgical recitation of beatitudes “pastors told us to forget” (p. 1).
The author continues to juxtapose the complacencies of a compromised religious tradition with an arresting vision of the Gospel and its “beatitude-economy” (p. xiv, again I am nodding to the foreword here). Even when theological language and biblical imagery is not explicitly front-and-center, the poems are beholden to a Scripture-shaped imagination and evocative of Bonhoeffer’s theological distinction between a costly faithfulness over against a cheap, artificial mode of discipleship.
In “Trump TongueTM” new, jarring life is breathed into what is sometimes reduced to a tired cliché, namely the image from the Epistle of James of the human tongue being like fire. Whereas the familiarity of this principle in certain moralistic frameworks can cause the truism to lose so much of its force, Webster reinfuses it with unavoidably concrete specificity and immediacy — this is a matter of political theology, of deceptive flames masked as light, begging for apocalyptic truth-telling. In the following entry, “Evangelical,” the very demographic that would love to see itself as the protagonist of Psalm 1, diligently dwelling upon Torah and muttering its syllables as pious prayers over a poor, lost world is exposed instead as the plotting and conspiring foil of Psalm 2. “Money conspires on their mouths” (p. 12) as they speak vacant falsehoods, undeniably at odds with the posture and vocation of The Lord’s Anointed.
In a way that is reminiscent of the book of Psalms as a whole, the poems in Notes sometimes feel like a collection of independent lyric performances, jostling against one another only because they happen to have fallen into this or that slot in the final arrangement; yet at other times, there seems to be a deliberateness, an overt logic to their literary sequence and organization. The two poems described above are a prime example of the latter, betraying a clear sense of intentionality in their depiction of a wayward demographic and its compromised political ideology.
Even in more subtle ways, however, the correspondence between successive poems is instructive and evocative, whether or not one discerns authorial organizational intention. Take, for example, the biblical figure of Cain, whose shadow is cast over the opening of Webster’s “The Weeds of Eden,” and the conclusion of the subsequent “Crow Funeral.” In the former “Cain’s blood” is pictured as the origin of weedy appendages that habitually choke out flourishing life, like “hooked vines around verdant trunks” (p. 7). In the latter poem the antagonist of Genesis 4 lends his visage to a poignant meditation on the tragic recurrence of mass shootings in America. Reflecting what one theologian has called “the emergence of S/sin,” these joined meditations invite theological attention to the interrelationship between sudden, unanticipated irruptions of violence and the ways in which death-dealing distortion weaves its way like tentacles through daily experience with mundane regularity.
Theologian Daniel Castelo describes the task of theology as tradition-negotiation. As others have recognized as well, there is simply no such thing as pure conservation of the tenets and practices of a given tradition, just as the notion of unbridled progress within a tradition devolves into absurdity. The former scenario is a recipe for the death of tradition, while the latter extreme will simply leave what has come before, behind. By contrast, a healthy tradition — a living tradition — is in a constant flux of faithful witness, striving to adhere to what has been passed on while adapting in concrete response to new situations and contexts.
Notes for a Postlude consistently reveals its grounding within and emergence out of a particular tradition, yet it pulls no punches when it comes to prophetic refusal of deep distortions that threaten to overwhelm and redefine it in the image of an imposter. One might say that an impulse toward faith and faithfulness is haunted throughout by despairing realism: many of the poems speak powerfully of the beauty of God’s creation and the witness of the natural world’s witness to life and flourishing; and yet almost each stanza gestures toward imagery of death. Simultaneously, while an urgent prophetic truth-telling refuses to look away from the ruptures of shalom and the hevel that so incessantly takes its place, these realisms too are haunted, but by the stubborn good news of the empty tomb.
Undoubtedly, this is poetry. And so, it is art. Yet it is also prophetic critique, comfort, and hope. It is euangelion. It is a witness to the proleptic certainty of resurrection hope. It is a summons to repent and to believe …
If we unsuspecting patrons expect an idle stroll through a gallery of a passive linguistic aesthetic, we just might find ourselves confronted instead by the kind of painting that Lewis’s Pevensie children encountered — suddenly shifting, coaxing, drawing us into encounter, self-awareness, turning and transformation. If we boldly expect to see the face of God in these pages, who’s to say that even a glimpse from behind the cleft of the rock, as though through a mirror dimly, might ask more of us than hearing, reading, and appreciative aesthetic delight.
I am convinced that the short, relatively obscure ancient Israelite prayer-poem known to us as Psalm 82 not only constitutes one individual passage within the Bible, but also offers a glimpse of the distinctive character of the God of Jewish and Christian faith, a window into the “strange new world” of the Christian Scriptures, and a summons to the kind of faithful witness that followers of Jesus are called to. Webster has given us a trove of similar gifts.
Rise up, O God, judge the earth,
For all the nations belong to you.
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