The Role of the Prophets

 Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations

 

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

 

 

Week Six: The Path of the Prophet

 

The Role of the Prophets

 

In The Tears of Things  

Richard Rohr offers a history of Israel’s prophets and the unique role they played:   

The prophets called Israel many times to return to the covenant God made with them at Mount Sinai. After leading the people out of Egyptian slavery, God supplied the law, including the Ten Commandments, that was meant to govern and shape their lives in the Promised Land. They were to refrain from lying, stealing, committing adultery, and so on. 

 

This was Morality 101, the basic order without which a society cannot maintain itself. But the people usually fell short, often disastrously so. They substituted purity codes and performance for the spirit of that law. They forgot not only what they had promised but also how much and how deeply YHWH cared for them. There was a deep need, then and now, for someone who would call the people to return to God and to justice. Someone who would warn them, critique them, and reveal God’s heart to them. We call them prophets, and every religion needs them.  

For hundreds of pivotal years—starting around 1300 BCE and continuing through the eras of Israel’s kingdom, exile, and conquest—prophets like Samuel, Jonah, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel performed this utterly important task. Besides being truth tellers, they were radical change agents, messengers of divine revelation, teachers of a moral alternative, and deconstructors of every prevailing order. Both Isaiah 21 and Ezekiel 3 describe a prophet as a “sentry” or a “watcher,” whose job is to hold Israel maddeningly honest, and to stop them from relying on arms, money, lies, and power to keep themselves safe and in control.  

In this way, they introduced a completely novel role into ancient religion: an officially licensed critic, a devil’s advocate who names and exposes their own group’s shadow side! Few cultures, if any, develop such a counterintuitive role. By nature, civilization is intent on success and building and has little time for self-critique. We disparage the other team and work ceaselessly to prove loyalty to our own.  

The same dynamics operate today, with those in power or trying to gain power more interested in protecting their own interests and positions than in seeking justice. We must be eternally conscious of this fact: For the untransformed self, religion is the most dangerous temptation of all. Our egos, when they are validated by religion, are given full permission to enslave, segregate, demean, defraud, and inflate—because all bases are covered with pre-ascribed virtue and a supposed hatred of evil. This is what the prophets expose in their wholesale assault on temple worship, priestly classes, self-serving commandments, and intergenerational wealth. “Be very careful here!” they keep shouting. The prophets know that religion is the best and that religion also risks being the worst. We love to choose sides and declare ourselves sinless and pure and orthodox (“right”), with little evidence that it is true. This is always a surprise to everyone except the prophets.