Intro to a prophet ...Have you ever known anybody you would call eccentric? Those people that natural effortlessly walk outside the line to the song of some other land. People that would rather be faithful than safe, that don’t give up easily. People that see things by a clear double vision: as things are and as they should be. People marked by a since of the ominous. A mystery that is greater than personality making them both attractive and suspect. Mostly, without articulation, we merely see them as special. Once in a life time people that by the force of who they are affect us radically for the good.
We used the word prophet to label such a person. They are people blessed with a burden of an inescapable calling to bare the weight of knowing thats not for them to know. ominous Knowledge full of gravity, but never whole, never complete, never ending. They are magnificent contradictions: People of paradox and passion.
The Authority of a prophet ...Walter Brueggemann describes prophets as “uncredentialed spokesmen for God.” They don't have any authority in the world but the word of faith. A prophet, almost by definition, doesn't fit into the categories you expect, which is what gives them bite, and clarity, and the sense of grabbing us by the scruff of our neck, and saying, "Listen to this: this is truth, this is what's going on." The whole authority of prophets comes not from what people say about them or the credentials that they have, it's from the truth of what they are saying. This is true of the Biblical prophets and of prophetic voices all through history.
Prophets are graced with a vision that is rooted in the reality of other people. Here we find the unbreakable social passion, and the effort that they go to speak to people of influence in order to try to convince them that pain and suffering and impoverishment are the responsibility of those who are in positions of influence and power.
The Beauty of a prophet ...Prophets are divine metaphors. Their lives are made to be divine metaphors. like Nature is prophetic in that it illustratives God’s character. So to are the lives of those marked to live in a short leash. They are made to illustrate, illuminate and often demonstrate "Divine-Pathos"(1).
Prophets don't have anything that Christ hasn't given them. They embody lives cut from the rock of suffering or the cradle of privilege. Some of them find a vocation that is apart from the visible Church, maybe by accident or maybe deliberately or maybe not intentionally. But they are following the Spirit in some unarticulated way. Sometimes I think God has to find a person who isn't carrying a lot of baggage or bad religion with them. A John the Baptist, for example, where did he come from? He didn't fit the categories of the first century. Other time I think God likes to make them home grown, from within the church, letting them nurse on all the half-truth till in one sick moment, enough is enough. There's honesty in them, Fallen broken honesty. They are not saying things that people want to hear to help them escape from their ordinary lives. They push us back into the conditions in which we have to live as people before a greater reality. The beauty of the prophet is the God of his call, and how He brings about all things to mold both the man and the message into one divine movement.
The gift of a prophet... The prophet doesn't seem to be calculated in what they are doing. It just comes out of who they are, and maybe that's why people respond to them, because they are so unconventional. I think they started out pretty confused and kind of just messing around. When looking from heaven or even just in hindsight, I think they must be as surprised about all that has come about through them, as we are of there accuracy. A prophet often knows 1/5 of the truth that he spits. They just know they should say it! A fire driving them to speak they just have to say it or they will explode. They can’t be themselves unless it is let out, truth has captured them like a trap. This is what they have to teach us. Not just want is real but what is authentic. When we're living with any kind of authenticity, we don't know what we are doing until, suddenly, moments of clarification -- catalytic moments -- and we see suddenly this is what I am, this is what I'm doing. But in the spiritual life, calculation doesn't work.
Some may ask, Why not? Well it's because most of it is about the Holy Spirit, not our spirits, and we're in on something much, much bigger than we have any idea of. If we try to contain it, or try to work with our boundaries or containers that we understand, we miss 98 percent of it. Most live asleep. And to wake up is to stop our calculating. Then we awaken to what is real and what has been before us all along. We come alive to the fact that we're working in the realm of God and relationships, of goodness and evil, and so suddenly like a bursting, God gets through our defenses and we're listening to something that is very, very important to us but that we've insulated or inoculated ourselves against. We learn to hear the real. Few live in the silence between the sound where God smiles and we hear. The place we take in new life and experience the freshness of approach that directs and molds all things.
This is the spiritual life to be gleaned from the prophet. A life under providential control, burning in both light and heart, emanating discourses laden with the full counsel of beauty truth and goodness. Such a life is an opening. There is a deep commonality of spirit when people are open to the beauty and the truth and the goodness of God that communicates itself to us. And if it's the genuine thing you can put a name to it: it's religious, it's spiritual, it's God. Not everybody puts the name to it but it doesn't mean they don't participate in it someway or other. The experiences of countless art lovers attest to this truth. Whether we name it rightly or name it not we participate in this reality ever time we experience or enter into creativity. The prophetic release of beauty truth and goodness often accompanies powerful works of creativity.
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(1) In his book The Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel describes the unique aspect of the Jewish prophets, according to Heschel the Hebrew prophets are characterized by their experience of what he calls — God turning towards humanity. Heschel argues for the view of Hebrew prophets as receivers of the "Divine Pathos," of the wrath and sorrow of God over his nation that has forsaken him. ”Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets Ch. 1)
