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.”