Fourteenth Sunday 1997

This is how the world looks to God

There seems to be a double focus in the three readings today: Ezekiel talks about having visions of God, and Paul talks about revelatory visions... So this visionary element is certainly something they had in mind when putting these things together. But the other thing is perhaps more clear namely, the emphasis on prophecy. Ezekiel is a prophet. And Paul, although in this passage doesn’t talk much about prophets, he often does. And certainly Jesus in that passage from Mark talks about prophets.

I think it is a pretty safe bet that the earliest attempts that people made to try and make sense of this man was to think of him as a prophet. Now, it would seem to us who grew up in the Christian tradition that this visionary business and the prophetic business are incompatible. But that’s just because I think we have misread what prophecy was about - as far as the Jews were concerned - because the prophetic life for the Jews was absolutely inseparable from some sort of visionary experience, as we read in Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. So now we have try and figure out what this is all about.

The prophets were extraordinarily important people in the history of Judaism. They are all men so far as we know, although there were a couple of women who were considered prophetesses as well, Deborah for example, or Anna in the Gospel of Luke. And what the Jews were celebrating in these people rather was that, through these human voices, the Jews believed they were hearing the voice of God: "Thus said the Lord" is the great prophetic introduction. We, as I said, in the Christian Churches are tempted to think of prophets as people who did nothing other than think about Jesus coming along 700 or 500 years later, and talking about him. Well, that’s a much later understanding of how prophets work because initially they were not considered "predictors". They were, rather simply, people who looked around at their world and said: "this is how the world looks to God." So this is the point at which we can make the connection between prophecy and visionary experience. How did they know that this was God talking? There were a lot of people saying, "Thus said the Lord," just as today there are all kinds of people running around saying, "God told me to tell you people..."

A slight bypass here: every religion has its notable figures of seers, or shamans, or magicians, or soothsayers. But the genius of the Jewish notion, and it is religiously unique as far as I know, is that their notion of the special people they call prophets is quite different from the regular sort of extraordinary religious personalities present everyplace else in this way: in other religions you have people doing magical stuff or extraordinary actions and achieving strange effects by efforts that don’t seem to be proportionate to these effects. Other religions have magical figures, but the Jewish prophet is extraordinary in that this is a person who basically referred to what is good and what is evil in human life as opposed to somehow enabling people to avoid problems in their lives, as did the Delphic oracle or soothsayers, for example. Everybody wants religion to be a sort of short-cut through life that smoothes over the rough spots, but not the Hebrew prophets. They came, rather, and said, in the words of Isaiah: "I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among the people of unclean lips." That is what I want to get to. What enabled Isaiah to understand himself in that way? It is precisely his vision, as we get that text in Isaiah, of the holiness of God. It is that that moved Isaiah to see what he saw and complain about what he complained about. That is an extraordinary thing.

We can talk about social justice or equity as if there is some sort of great moral code to which we are supposed to be adhering. That’s not the Jewish view at all. The Jewish view says that the fundamental reality that underlies the world is this God who desires that we human beings not oppress each other. That is the Holy, not some magical, mystical, escapist sort of thing, as so much New Age religion, for example, proposes. That is what is Holy. It is out of this conviction, that that is the ultimate meaning of holiness, that they would then go and say: "We are oppressing each other. We are being unfaithful to this God who is Holy, this God who is absolutely against oppression, this God who is on the side of the losers..." This seems to have been how, and we’re not too sure why, the Jews were able to say who were real prophets and who were not. We have in Jeremiah that famous line from one of the prophets whom Jeremiah thought was false saying: "Peace, peace... Everything is swell and we’re all great; the status quo is splendid and it is just what it is supposed to be." Then Jeremiah comes along and says: "No, no, it’s not. Rather the status quo is marked by us being dishonest with each other, hiding from each other, and violating each other in one way or another." But again, it is very important to keep in mind that that non-oppressive relationship is the very essence of holiness as far as the Jews are concerned. God is that one who lets be, who lets everybody be together, and before whom nobody has to be afraid for themselves, as opposed to the normal way we function by intimidating each other. Clearly, that’s what was going on when they thought that Jesus was a prophet: here was this guy running around with all these lowlifes, taking seriously all these people whom nobody else took seriously, and who were thought of as inconsequential.

So the prophetic vocation, as far as the Jews are concerned, is absolutely inseparable from that understanding of who God is, that visionary experience, if you will. It is simply undoable apart from that. It is Jesus’ belief that God was, and that God was love, and that God was on the side of the oppressed that enabled him to operate as he did and enabled people to recognize in him the figure of a classical Jewish prophet. So all this is really important, because the greater danger to any serious religion is its trivialization, and it is very easy to trivialize the prophets and say "ah, yeah... They were back there determining that Jesus was going to be born in Bethlehem, his mother was going to be virginal, the Kings were going to come..." That is all magical escapism. Rather, the prophets do what every earnest religious character is supposed to do, and that is: to move me to ask myself the absolutely fundamental questions about what I think is utterly fundamental in my life, and how I define the Holy, and how am I therefore to look at the world and act in that world with that vision.

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RT 5/9/97