A walker spotted a man in a boilersuit sitting high up on the branch of the tree while trying to saw off that same branch. The walker told the man: ‘If you keep going, you will fall down and get hurt.’ The man on the tree mumbled something under his breath, ignored the advice, and kept on sawing. So the walker shrugged his shoulders and continued along the path. Suddenly he heard an almighty thump behind him; he looked back and saw the branch off and the man spreadeagled on the ground. He smiled grimly to himself when the man stood up and shouted at him: ‘Oi! Are you a damn prophet or what?’
This only mildly amusing anecdote is based on the common perception or understanding of the main role of a prophet. When we hear this word we probably think about a person equipped with special powers to announce future happenings unknown to everyone else, or to predict the unpredictable. We don’t consider people able to anticipate or foresee possible future events as a result of the actual circumstances to be prophets; we consider them sensible, or clever, or educated, or… scientists. The knowledge that prophets have comes from a supernatural source with no direct links to their personal brainpower, education or position. This commonly popular way of thinking about prophets is an unintentional result of reading the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, through the prism of the Christian faith as contained in the New Testament. Many facts and acts in Jesus’ life and public activity are presented and explained as the fulfilment of the ancient oracles. Consequently common sense tells us that those guys several hundred years earlier had to have some special, miraculous, supernatural revelation given to them by God, foretelling events in the distant future. The problem is that prophets didn’t. And so our understanding of what it is to be a prophet is false.
In today’s first reading Moses, sensing that the end of his life is approaching, announces: ‘Your God will raise up for you a prophet like myself.’ That’s a bit strange, because we don’t consider Moses to be a prophet in the usual sense of the word. He was a great and powerful figure, the leader of the Jewish uprising against Egypt, and the creator of the Jewish religious and national identity; but not a prophet. Yet he proclaims a future prophet like him. When we read this pronouncement further on, there’s a clear order given: ‘to him [the new prophet] you must listen.’ Almost automatically we think this predicted the coming of the ultimate Prophet, Jesus Christ, a thousand years later. But it didn’t. Moses predicts the possibility that a prophet can be wrong or even false, and therefore shouldn’t be obeyed but punished. So it couldn’t have been Jesus; Moses was talking about a prophet.
So, who were they and what was their role? They were people taking God’s message, law and commandments seriously as the means of shaping personal, social, religious and political life. They were meditating on the Word of God and then applying it to their own lives, and calling the communities of which they were part of to do the same. If and when they announced any future events, these were seen as the natural consequences of people’s actions or inactions. The prophets were the interpreters of their current social or political circumstances in the light of God’s revelation. They did what I try ineffectively to do with each of my sermons. And so you can see that prophets are not a thing of the distant past. Prophets – though we don’t use this term any more – are people meditating on the law of the Lord and applying it to their own current situations. At your baptism you were called to be a prophet. And that call comes back now and again, in the words of today’s responsorial psalm: ‘O that today you would listen to His voice! Harden not your heart.’