The Challenge of a Prophetic Voice
I once asked a group of children what a prophet was. I should have known better. The response came back: “It’s what your money does in the bank.” Well, not so much any more. In spite of the homonym problem, it might be instructive in the light of today’s Scriptures to consider the meaning of a prophet.
Jonah, Paul and the Marcan Jesus are clearly functioning in the traditional sense of a prophet. All three are confronting a crisis of sorts. All three are speaking out about a sense of urgency. All are calling for a transformation. The Evangelist Mark places this in the context of the call--not just of the twelve, but of every one of us. The call to be disciples is the call to be prophets, and it has two essential elements.First of all, contrary to popular opinion, you don’t have to rant, rave and reproach. But you will have to have a “prophetic voice.” According to Jesuit Michael Moynahan in his book How the Word Became Flesh, this means that the challenges must be rooted in the ability to grieve. “For grief is the most visceral announcement that things are not right.
You must bring your own and your people’s hurt to public expression.
Prophetic criticism, then consists in the ability
to be compassionate, to cry out with others
because the prophet experiences and stands in their pain."
There is no shortage of pain in our day. Whether it is the unborn, the elderly, those suffering from the effects of war, those alienated because of their religious beliefs, those doomed by hunger and poverty--our world today is experiencing genuine pain.“Prophets are called to be compassionate people, people who have the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve, and the faith to believe that there is never life without death or death without life.”Each one of us is called to be a prophet who recognizes and gives voice to the suffering, for example, caused by the severe social issues of divorce and family alienation, the victimization of women and children in human trafficking, the marginalization of our immigrants, the stress and depression of people losing jobs and homes. Whether we ourselves suffer from these issues or not, we give voice to those who do. Secondly, a "prophet energizes people by first having a dream and then teaching others to dream." As prophets we must help other people embrace hope in their suffering, in their pain. We energize people by helping them to believe again, by telling the “old story” of God’s faithfulness and love
again and again since we all have such short memories."
As prophets we are called to bring this story to people right around us in our daily lives—in our families, our neighborhoods, the workplace, our churches and our communities. In our daily routine we learn to engage the promise of newness at work in our history with God. This, Moynahan claims, is how we can see the connection between the prophetic roles of challenging and energizing. “Newness comes from expressed pain; suffering made audible and visible becomes hope;
articulated grief is the gate to newness.
As Christians, as prophets, we must grow
to appreciate and experience that Resurrection is the ultimate act of prophetic energizing...."
To be a prophet then, to speak with a prophetic voice, is to challenge through compassion and energize through hope. If the context of prophecy is a crisis, we are in no short supply in our times. So much of the root causes of our present crises arise from failing to be aware of the suffering of others. The effects of war, the causes of poverty, the results of rampant consumerism and greed, the alienation and anger in the church, the thoughtless abandonment of the weak and oppressed and all those who have no voice--the list seems endless. But the question for us today is whether there is anyone who will be the Jonah, the Paul, the Twelve, the Jeremiah, the Judith, the Deborah of our day. If prophecy means anything, it means speaking the Word of God where we are, to those with whom we find ourselves, in the only ways we know how to speak. But make no mistake about it, as the Gospels so often warn, the hardest place to do this is where we live.Nourished in this Eucharist with the Word that offers us models of prophetic voices, we embrace the call to be prophets in our time by challenging with compassion and energizing with hope.Michael Moynahan, How the Word Became Flesh: Story Dramas for Worship and Religious Education, Resource Publications, 1981. But,