Mark 10:42-45

By: Rachel Jones

Prophets are intended to be truth-tellers of the most serious kind – the truth that could save or kill, hurt or heal, engender love or hate. Some of what they learn can drive them crazy. Some of what they say can get them killed. At first blush, prophets are the first people to spot a trend, a change in the weather, a shift in the mood, and that sounds like a nice perk. But they are also the first ones to see the break in the track, feel the chill in the wind, smell the fire before the smoke starts, and that is not so much fun. Sometimes people don’t pay attention to the warnings, the pleadings, the dire and shrill assurances that a reckoning is now in process. 

Prophets are the ancient Pythias, writhing in the pneuma, muttering the messages from Apollo to the early Greeks; Jeremiah, resting restlessly on his side for all those days and nights, begging people to wake up and act like they were the children of the Most High; the utterly poetry-free, stone-cold sober, post-modern scientist, writhing in the smog of early 21^st Century pollution, begging us all to do a little bit different, a little bit better. Their job isn’t to tell the future in stunning detail or stark relief. Their job is to tell us what they see, what they understand; it’s not to explain things. How few of them, sacred and secular, have really understood the profound underpinnings of what they’ve been charged to share? But even in the face of the naked acknowledgment that there is always a lack of total understanding, each prophet eventually succumbs to the compulsion to speak their piece, because they have to; even if it’s imperfect in practice, the true and right message transcends the messenger. And that makes them difficult people to know, much less to be; they are constantly being spoken through, without ever really speaking.  They are serious people, most of the time, even in moments of joy and refreshment.

Sometimes we hear and respond to what the prophets say, not just about the doomsday, or transgressions, or irreparable damage; we also hear them talk about jubilee, about restoration, about hopes and promises, and justice and peace. Sometimes we hear them talk about divine favor and grace, and we hear them ask us to do our part: to love and live with a light and gentle hand, to be intentional about how we love. The prophets charge us to be radical to celebrate life and God’s love for us at every turn. In following their mandates, we come to discover that prophets and prophecy are hard gifts to unwrap, because the message and the messengers can so often be both bitter and sweet; but they are gifts we must unwrap, listen to, and live beside. 

We would have inward peace,
Yet will not look within;
We would have misery cease,
Yet will not cease from sin;

Once, read your own heart right
And you will have done with fears;
Man gets no other light
Though he search a thousand years.
(Matthew Arnold, 1852)