NOTES for Joe 1:10-20

The disaster over which the prophet Joel weeps at the beginning of the first chapter of his book is not merely a historical event or an ecological catastrophe. For him, as a man of faith, everything happens before the face of God and is understood exclusively in the context of a relationship with the Creator. This is why the invasion of locusts and its devastating consequences move the prophet to turn to Him in penitential prayer. Human vulnerability before the forces of nature is thus understood as a direct consequence of estrangement from God and unfaithfulness to Him. This can equally be applied to all human suffering.

Joel’s call to fasting and prayer has a distinctive feature peculiar to him. He attaches exceptional importance to maintaining the Temple sacrifices, and this is one of the grounds for counting Joel among those who served in the Temple and regarding him as a Temple prophet. For him, all life is centred on the Temple as the spiritual centre of the world. Prophets who do not serve in the Temple do not place such emphasis on worship, and even Ezekiel, a priest, does not put it first. But for Joel, the service performed in the Temple is the chief expression of human faithfulness to God. That is precisely why the cessation of sacrifices, caused by the devastation of the land, is so terrible for the prophet.

The age in which the prophet Joel lived was marked by people’s almost complete indifference to faith. Only the Temple ritual still survived in some form, but for most people even this had ceased to be communion with the living God. The prophet sees this religious indifference and total disregard for the Lord’s commandments as the principal cause of the terrible disaster. And this disaster is such that it brings to an end even the last thing that linked the people to God: the Temple sacrifices. Thus the whole of human life is severed from its source. As the Lord Jesus Christ would say four centuries later: ‘From the one who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.’

Yet the prophet sees this great devastation itself as an omen, a prophecy of the coming Day of the Lord. The growth of sin in the days of the prophet Joel reaches its logical conclusion: the cessation of the worship of God in the Temple. In the same way, everything that people consider, if not permissible, then at least more or less tolerable, will take its fully developed form on that terrible Day of Visitation. On that Day, all the consequences of people’s moral choices will become evident, including those we do not recognise or do not wish to recognise. It is in this sense that the devastation of Israel becomes a herald of the coming Judgement of God.