WHAT PROPHESY MEANS
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
January 30, 2021
There’s a very big difference between being right and being
loved-between speaking the truth and shouting a lie (or what is just my
opinion.) When we were setting up our weekly parking lot masses at Noon on
Sundays here several months ago, we arranged for a very low radio signal that
could reach from our doors to the limits of the parking lot.
And that’s exactly what it does. If you are at the gas station up the road, or
at the fire station down that way, you can’t hear anything on our radio
broadcast.
This is not about mass media overwhelming all other
voices. It’s about inviting people who
are willing and open to hearing what is true having an opportunity to do that
right here on our grounds. That’s about
as far as it goes.
In some respects, that radio broadcast is different from our
live stream masses, which are viewed, literarily, from around the world every
week. But in another respect it’s not so
different, because in both cases people still have to want to be here, to choose
to be here, and to be confronted with God’s word and sacrament. Nobody will ever find Pax Christi on line
unless they go in search of us. We don’t
drown out all the other media voices out there. Instead, when we are at our best, we offer a place for people, who are
seeking, to hear and to recognize the real God. And no one person accomplishes
that sacred task alone; we engage it together as a community.
Today’s scripture invites us to consider the ministry of
prophesy in our religious practice. Prophets
are sometimes imagined to be there wild, shrieking, eccentric people who
attract attention to themselves by being the most charismatic or the most odd
people in the room, - insisting that a whole community change direction and pay
attention to something new, or something that’s being neglected. And sometimes that’s right. But prophesy is a two - way street. It not only requires the courage of the one who speaks. It also requires the openness, the humility,
and the honesty of the many who listen- and who are able to hear something
right and compelling in what the prophet is saying.
Without a discerning community of faith around him/her, the
alleged prophet is nothing more than what St. Paul would describe as “a noisy
gong or a clanging symbol”.
This is why so many so-called TV evangelists are deserving
of our skepticism, and its why Catholics too, need to be wise and together as
we struggle to hear the legitimate voices of prophets among us. They are still among us, but not every
religious person who commands us to change is thereby a prophet.
In today’s first reading from the book of Deuteronomy, Moses
promises the people, near the end of his life, that God will be faithful in
raising up a reliable prophet in Israel, to whom the people must listen and
follow. But at the very same time Moses
warns them that there will be others who will come along presuming to preach
and teach what “God” thinks and what “God” wants. In other words, pious frauds. And their effect will be lethal, both for
themselves and others.
This is why the discernment of real prophesy in our church
is not only an act of listening to a lone voice. It’s also about conversing-together-about the
truth and the merits of what that voice is saying. We have a whole tradition to help us
here. Our faith, both Jewish and
Christian, was never entrusted to exactly one person, so it should never be
hijacked by exactly one person who claims to know it all.
When a real prophet speaks, he/she entrusts the message to a community that can hear an echo of truth in the words, even if it may
sometimes demand radical and painful change for all of us. That is what prophesy does. In the end, it’s not all about the
personality of the prophet. It’s about
right faith.
But I should qualify that last sentence, because for us
Christians there’s one exception to that rule. In the case of Jesus, it certainly is all about the personality
of the prophet, because he is the very definition and demonstration of what it
means to speak of “right faith.”
In today’s gospel of Mark, it is significant that he is
not only speaking, but others are listening-both human beings and evil
spirits in the synagogue that day. It’s
not a lone man engaged in a monologue. It’s a conversation-a discernment about just what exactly is going on
here. “Who is this man?” “What has he to do with us?” “What is This?”
Truly to engage the voice of a real prophet of God does not
involve digging in our heels and shutting out the messages that we don’t want
to hear. Prophets are real. Nor does it involve trying to out-shout or
out strategize our perceived religious enemies. It involves the humility to stand before the truth-together.
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