Disaster and Renewal
Joel is one of the most enigmatic of the minor prophets. All attempts to understand his message suffer from a variety of scholarly interpretation and no consensus. In this week’s readings therefore we shall begin where we areJoel was rather than to try to appreciate where because there is so much that we don’t know. We know nothing about the author (whose name simply means ‘Yahweh is God’), nor when he prophesied (probably c400 BCE), nor about the background against which he prophesied, and it wouldn’t help much if we did.
What we do know is that Joel is a poem with two principle themes — judgement leading to repentance, and deliverance leading to renewal — and the purpose of repentance is not to make people feel bad (or indeed good) but to give God a chance to engage in renewal.
At its heart, clear and indisputable, is a dreadful plague of locusts, but it is not about locusts. It is about disaster and in that context it comes across as a creed, hammered out in harsh experience, or a story in four parts to tell your grandchildren. One, the worst disasters can be handled. Two, sometimes we have to change. Three, what we cannot change we have to accept. Four, God is always there to help and support.
Begin therefore by focusing on a disaster in your own experience: something entirely unexpected, horrible to contemplate or describe, which you will never forget, which wrecked people’s lives and which you will tell your children and grandchildren. It may be personal (a family quarrel, bereavement or break-up), local (your church or community), national or world-wide. It may be physical (people lost everything), psychological (mental trauma) or spiritual (a threat to faith) or a mixture of all three.
In any such disaster, think how reading Joel’s poem might have helped, how it might have led to radical and positive change, and how it might help others going through similar experiences.