“‘I’ve loved you,’ the Holy One says. And you said, ‘How have you loved us…'” (Malachi 1.2a).
If your recollection of Malachi—as mine was—is tied to the familiar Advent verses, you may not recall how it begins. Here, after eleven books of the word of the Holy One being declared over the course of generations, is the voice of humanity responding, asking questions, wondering why.
In both the Tanakh—the Jewish Bible—and the familiar Protestant Christian Bible the Twelve Prophets are arranged the same, beginning with Hosea and ending with Malachi. However, what follows these prophets appears quite different.
In the Protestant Christian tradition the end of Malachi, with its words promising that Elijah will be sent before the coming of God, is positioned just before the Gospel of Matthew. There we hear of John the Baptist who walked in the spirit of the prophet Elijah, heralding the coming of Jesus, commanding that we make straight the crooked paths and low the hills.
In the Tanakh, Malachi is the final book of the prophetic writings or Nevi’im—a collection that begins with the story of Joshua, stretches through the historical books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, then turns to the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other prophets. After Malachi comes the third and final collection known as the Kethuvim or Writings. What sets the Kethuvim apart from the Nevi’im is that instead of God’s voice we hear, for the most part, human voices.
Here, in the Kethuvim, we find the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. The stories of Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah—books of prayers, instruction. Books where God is silent or merely—in the case of Job—a climax, a Presence who is closer and yet more mysterious than we have yet understood.
Which, when you come to think of it, isn’t all that different from the Gospels and letters of the early Christian communities.
In both the Kethuvim and the Gospels we encounter the words and actions of human beings, most of them just like us. The world they inhabit is permeated with the Divine and punctuated by moments of contact with the Holy. In the Psalms we hear the prayers of the people of God, rejoicing and lamenting, celebrating and asking questions. It is not that different from the encounters with Jesus: cries for hope, exclamations of joy, and, of course, attempts to understand.
Make no mistake, the content in these two collections can be quite different. But what ties them together is Malachi. For in this one book we hear the beginning of a conversation between humanity and its God. It is the response not of a subservient people but of those bound up in a shared journey. It’s the sound of a relationship, one that spans centuries and lifetimes and has no end. And the collections that follow it seek to respond to the question at its outset.
A response that says, listen, and I will tell you the ways.
Jesus, friend and companion, you walk the road with us, pausing as the evening arrives to share the night. Help me in this busy life and these long, full days to seek and to find moments to cultivate our relationship.