We Face The Hardness Of Heart We See Now And Overthrow It Or We Will Face Even Harder Hardness And Very Soon - The Plague Cycle Is As Timely As Could Be

It is precisely the prophet who speaks against such managed data and who can energize toward futures that are genuinely new and not derived. I suggest three energizing dimensions to this narrative that are important for prophetic imagination.

First, energy comes from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness. That darkness which is frightening in its authority appears here in the hardness of heart. That motif pervades this strange text. At every turn, it is affirmed not that Pharaoh’s heart is hard but that Yahweh hardens it. It is Yahweh’s peculiar way of bringing the empire to an end. It is Yahweh’s odd way to present the possibility of historical freedom. There is more here than can be understood, but whatever else it means it begins in the conviction that God works on both sides of the street. The despairing ones do not see how a newness can come, how evil can be overcome, or how futures can arise from the totalitarian present. This awesome programmatic statement affirms that something is “on the move” in the darkness that even the lord of the darkness does not discern. It is strange that neither Egypt nor Israel understands the movement in the darkness! Israel is no more privy to God’s freedom than Egypt is. And when Israel yearns to know too much about that freedom, Israel easily plays the role of Egypt. In any case, this narrative knows that the darkness may be trusted to him as it surely cannot be trusted to Pharaoh. That is energizing because the alternative community dares to affirm how it will turn out. It knows that Pharaoh does not know. It knows, but it does not understand. It knows because it has submitted, and that submission began when the cry was cried toward the free one. There is new energy in finding one who can be trusted with the darkness and who can be trusted to be more powerful than the one who ostensibly rules the light.

It is one of the things that I remember wondering about, why God kept hardening Pharaoh’s heart, leading to ever greater plagues against, not only Pharaoh but also the People of Egypt in general. That’s true in the Prophetic tradition that hardness of heart is a recurring accusation against the Children of Isreal, too, and in the period in which they had their own nation only to give it up in the face of dangers and temptations. Brueggemann’s analysis of this difficult issue is one that makes sense in human experience, putting your faith in a static seeming security that you hope you can depend on is comforting but it leads nowhere. We in the United States are still not over those conventional, comforting and totally failing institutions and idols and largely mythological national myths but those have led us to favor ignorance and corruption and a lying promise of secure prosperity.

It isn’t as if we haven’t been warned by our own prophets, Dorothy Day, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Cone, as I pointed out last week, John Oliver when he was speaking prophetically, even as the anti-prophetic voices that dominate the mass media and the Pharaonic entertainment regime that brought us Reagan and then Trump, and encouraged the moral and intellectual corruption that has led us into hell has ignored and led away from those warnings. That is not a surprise, as I have always needed to point out, truth is often hard to take and it cannot be made palatable and icky sweet in ways that lies can because the substrate of a lie is not in hard realism but in malleable, ductile, shapable, deceptive opportunism. That is something that the judges and justices have either not realized or they have intentionally used, that fact makes lies more powerful than the truth until the truth prevails and its hard lessons cannot be put off any longer, but by then the crooks, gangsters, sadists and their minions in the legal profession and in judging and “justice”ing are retired or dead.

Anyone who wants to see hardness of heart that we will have to get past to get onto a future can look at the Supreme Court that recently ruled that there is no obligation to provide prisoners with ways to avoid the deadly plague we are going through. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas are little pharaohs with hearts as hard as osmium, what we do with that hardness of heart is up to us. We can use it to energize us to dump them or we can live with the even harder hardness that will come without us doing that.