Sunday, July 7, 2013

The Prophet

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time


Our first reading was from Isaiah – and he was a prophet.  Paul, the author of our second reading, was a prophet.  And certainly Jesus was a prophet.  So I want to ask:  what is a prophet?

Often we take the word “prophesy” to mean the same as “predict”.  So a prophet basically predicts what is going to happen.  But that is not how Jews and certainly not how Jesus understood what it means to be a prophet. 

The word itself “prophet” literally means to speak in front of.  A prophet is a public speaker.  In Jewish understanding a prophet is God’s spokesman.  Through his study, prayer and openness to God, God comes to inhabit the prophet’s mind and heart.  God gives the prophet his own spirit:  what makes God move and act.  To have God’s spirit is to have God’s own feelings.  The prophet publicly speaks and shows God’s feelings.  Isaiah speaks of God’s feelings toward Israel as those of a mother comforting her child.

The prophet’s life is difficult and lonely because his words and actions confront us with what we have allowed ourselves to become.  We waste our feelings by scrimping and skimping with them.  We waste our love by being all too stingy, too controlling with it.  To use Isaiah’s image, we are not sucking in fully the milk of God’s love.  We are acting as if God, our Creator, does not have abundant breasts to feed us with life and love.  So how then can we, God’s creatures, how can we possibly hope to live and love generously?  We have no sense of their abundance within us – no sense of their God-given abundance within us. 

In Indian folklore there’s a story about the lion that as a cub was raised by sheep.  The lion grew up to think of himself as a lamb.  But then one day he saw a real lion and recognized himself in the lion.  So he stopped eating grass.  He stopped running away from other lions and joined them as one of them. 

The prophet shows us our real lion so we can recognize ourselves.  Prophets will always provoke us to a painful moment of truth – so we can finally recognize in ourselves God’s Spirit already dwelling within us – recognize in ourselves God’s own feelings of love and compassion already within our hearts and yearning to find expression in our lives. 

In the gospel the prophet Jesus says: “I have observed Satan fall like lightening from the sky.”  In the scriptures Satan is always our grand accuser – our grand false accuser – claiming God’s love, God’s spirit is not within us – claiming we have no abundance within us.  Satan will fall – like lightening from the sky – fall from our lives and our loves – if we let Jesus be our prophet reawakening us to God’s spirit within us.  Then the words of Isaiah will speak directly and clearly, as the prophet says to us:  “When you see this, your heart shall rejoice and your bodies flourish like grass; the Lord’s power shall be known to his servants.”