Thoughts on Prophecy

A Sunday talk . . .

Jesus talked to his disciples about being like light, and salt, and yeast.  Small things that maybe work quietly and unobtrusively, but which make a real difference where they’re used.  I preached about this somewhere else last week, and I talked about how even a small light, a single candle perhaps, drives back the dark and makes a place brighter, better and indeed safer.  I talked about how a little bit of salt can bring out the flavour of the tomato on my sandwich, or the fish and chips in my paper.  I talked about the way just a pinch of yeast allows my dough to rise and to become something than can be baked into a loaf of bread.  And part at least of the task of the Christian disciple is to work in quiet ways, and not to our own glory but to God’s glory, to make the world around us a better place, more light and more loving.

But then thinking it over later, it occurred to me that light and salt and maybe even yeast can also be troublesome things. Of course we know that too much light can be an instrument of torture, and too much salt can swamp and spoil the flavour rather than bring it out, and too much yeast will produce something sour and inedible.  But even in smaller quantities, light and salt and yeast can be a bit troublesome.  Light shows up things we might prefer stayed hidden away.  Salt gets into sore or wounded places and makes them smart.  Yeast changes the shape of things and forces the components of my loaf of bread to work together in ways they otherwise might not.  These images show up another necessary part of the ministry of the Christian disciple.  Christians are called to be troublesome sometimes and not just nice, because we are called to bring the truth of God into places where just perhaps that truth is denied or distorted.  One word for this is prophecy.  Christians and the Church, capital C, are called to a prophetic ministry.  So what does that mean?

There were lots of prophets in the Old Testament days.  Our Bibles hold the writings of some of them, and tell the stories of others.  Prophets had a place in the courts of kings, and in the decisions made by great men.  So let’s look for a moment or two at two prophets who were around at the same time as each other, but whose prophecies followed dramatically different paths.

One of these prophets was Hananiah, and the other was Jeremiah. They were both important and well known figures within the court of the king - and this at a time when, politically speaking, things were tense and worrisome in the little kingdom of Judea.  The Babylonians whose empire lay to the north were flexing their muscles. They’d already carried the previous king and many of his people into exile, along with a substantial part of the temple treasury.  Faced with this situation, Jeremiah was saying 'Things must not go on as they are.  We need to face up to the truth.  We've let God down, and now we are being punished for that.  It's his will that Babylon should conquer us.'  That’s what Jeremiah was saying;  Hananiah, on the other hand, was saying something quite different, along the lines of: 'Don't worry. You know that God will always be on our side, because we are his special people.  So of course he won't allow the Babylonians to win. Everything will be all right.'

In our New Testaments we can read St Paul’s warning to Timothy about the false teachers whose words would, as he said, 'tickle the ears' of those who heard them.  Of course it's always a big temptation for a speaker or preacher to say things that will please his audience.  Everyone likes to be liked.  To his cost Jeremiah discovered that if you say things people don't want to hear they won't like you.  They may even attack you.  But these were the words God had given him to say - they burned inside him, and he couldn’t be silent.

That's what being a prophet is like, or should be like.  There’s an important and valid Christian ministry of comforting and soothing, of affirming and supporting.  We are to be bearers of good news, and good news should be a good thing to hear, a comfort and a strength.  But not at the expense of the truth.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be nice all the time?  The Christian Church continues to be very much part of the establishment of our nation, so that all kinds of civic and national events have a Christian religious content; so that bishops still sit in the House of Lords, and officiate at royal weddings, and crown a new king or queen.  I don’t have a problem with that, unless being part of the establishment means you’re expected to give uncritical support and blessing to whoever is in power and to whatever they might choose to do.

Because that's the sort of thing the prophet Hananiah was doing.  It’s also what he said God ought to be doing. If we're God's people then it's his job to stand beside us and fight for us:  that's more or less what Hananiah had to say.  But when Jeremiah talks about God he talks about him in very different terms.  Jeremiah talks about a holy God, about the righteous God who calls from his people a standard of holiness and righteousness that is a match for his.  St Paul is saying something very similar when he writes about becoming slaves to righteousness.  If instead we choose to go our own way, if instead we choose to live in a way that denies God's justice and righteousness, we can't expect him to come and bail us out of trouble whenever we ask him to.

I'm sure that when Jesus talked to his disciples about being light and salt and yeast he was urging them to take hold of the truth and to speak it and act it out in a prophetic way. Faith that’s a living faith has to be do much more than a safety net or a comfort blanket or a spare time hobby - it ask of us nothing less than the whole of our life.

Faith that’s a living faith will be the faith of a prophet.  A prophetic Church will be ready to comfort the afflicted, but part of its brief is also to afflict the comfortable;  it will be quick to bind up the wounds of those who are hurt, but will also be salt to aggravate a few wounds where people are too apathetic to see their neighbour's need or too self-obsessed to recognise their own responsibility.

What will that mean in practice?  It means that the Church, capital C, must never be afraid of unpopularity, for it must always be on the side of the truth.  The prophet is the one who sees the bad things that happen and doesn’t turn aside from that;  who hears the voices of those who are weak and powerless, and responds, and speaks for them, and pleads their cause.  Politicians may say, “Keep out of our world of politics”; and others will say the same, from their own positions of entrenched self-interest.  But the Church has a duty not only to seek out the lost and the hurt and to bind up wounds, but to challenge the people and the policies that do damage.  That’s a political task perhaps, but it isn’t a party political task.  The Church has to be independent of party politics, for we serve a higher master than any earthly ruler.

Should the individual Christian be a member of a political party?  Personally, I’m not, and I’ve cast my vote for many a different party in my time.  But of course an individual Christian can be a member of the political party of his or her choice - and I’ve met many politicians who are marvellously inspired and motivated by their active Christian faith.  But as with our membership of any organisation, I think that Christians should always be somewhat uncomfortable members - active, hard working, encouraging, supportive, all of those things, but never so tied to our allegiance to any one cause that it takes precedence over our allegiance to our Lord.  Sometimes our faith will require us to challenge things that are wrong.  Sometimes other people won’t like that.

But while a prophetic Church will always praise, applaud, encourage and pray blessing upon the things that are good in the world around us, the prophetic mantle we inherit is that of Jeremiah and not of Hananiah.  So easy to turn a blind eye, but we must never do that.  So easy too to go along with the crowd, to say the popular and populist things that everyone else is saying, but we must never do that either.  So easy to pass by on the other side, and you may remember that in the parable Jesus told that’s exactly what the expected good guys, the priest and the Levite, chose to do.

But where would that leave us?  I’m reminded here of the well-known piece by the German pastor Martin Niemoller, who was imprisoned by the Nazis and became a symbol of peace and reconciliation in the post-War German church:

First they came for the communists,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
 and there was no one left to speak for me.

We must never keep silence about the things that are wrong, about the abuses of power, the distortions of the truth, the injustices that mar the face of the world.  It's no excuse to claim that they don’t directly impinge on our lives or the places where we happen to live.  Anything that hurts other people, that cripples other lives, that damages other parts of our world has to be our business, because it is our Lord’s business, and we are his people.

Christ continues to call us to be lights in the world, to the glory of God - lights to comfort and reassure, lights for joy and safety and peace, but also lights to reveal and challenge and change the things that other people try to hide, and the deeds that are born of darkness.