Readings of the day: Amos 7:12-15; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13
We might find it curious that, in the Bible, nobody God calls to be a prophet wants to be a prophet. Why is this? There are several reasons why the Biblical prophets do not tend to want to be prophets. Some of them are all too aware of their own inadequacy, moral or otherwise, for the task. I think of Isaiah, who pleads with God, to no avail, to choose a better prophet than him, “a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips,” or Elijah, who hides from God in a cave to avoid being sent out as a prophet: “Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”
Other prophets in the Bible have other reasons for being reluctant to accept God’s call to prophesy. Prophets during the time of Israel’s kings in the Old Testament tended not to have good reputations, or they were not widely accepted by the people who were meant to receive their messages. Many kings of the time hired “professional” prophets, who usually told the kings what they wanted to hear. Some prophets of Israel’s royal court were not simply flatterers to the king in this way, but these court prophets who challenged the king (much less got away with it with their lives or reputations intact) were few.
Enter Amos, whose call to be a prophet we hear about today. Amos is no professional prophet of any royal court. He is a humble “herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees.” In fact, Amos is not even from the Kingdom of Israel, but from Judah. Now, this becomes a bit confusing: After the death of King Solomon, son of King David, Israel split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah, centered around Jerusalem, in the south. Judah often claimed to have held onto belief in only the one God, whereas Israel and its kings believed in or worshipped many gods. This led to Israel and Judah resenting each other, so we can understand a bit better why “Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” orders Amos to return to Judah and “never again prophesy at Bethel.”
The setting of Bethel for Amos’ call as a prophet is appropriate; it is also a bit ironic. Bethel literally means “house of El” or “house of God” (El is a Hebrew name for God). It was near the border between Israel and Judah. Bethel is where the Book of Genesis says Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder between heaven and earth took place. Yet because Bethel is situated where it is—not as far away as Jerusalem, for people who lived in the northern Kingdom of Israel—Jeroboam, the first king of Israel as a kingdom separate from Judah, built golden calves, one at Bethel, so that the people of Israel did not have to travel all the way to the temple of Jerusalem to worship. Does this story of a golden calf sound familiar? The presence of a golden calf in Bethel led the people of Israel to worship it, an idol, instead of the one God of Israel, just as the golden calf in Exodus had led the people of Israel into idolatry back then. Bethel, the “house of God,” had become a house of idol worship; a house of a false god.
God sends Amos to Bethel to preach against this worship of false gods, and all the unfaithfulness and injustices that went along with it. And, we can imagine, Amos and his message were not well-received by the king of Israel, the officials of his court, or most of the people of Israel. It would be as if a foreign leader or influential person were to travel to another country today and criticize the leaders and people of that country on their own soil. This is usually not received well, even if the criticism is justified.
“Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” essentially tells Amos to go home to Judah and spare Israel and its king the criticism Amos directs against them. This would be well and good if Amos were one of those professional royal court prophets kings of that time were used to. But Amos’ prophetic mission is not his own; it is from God. Amos never wanted to be a prophet, but God had called him from tending his flock and sycamore trees to prophesy in Israel.
In Mark’s Gospel today, we meet more people—Jesus’ twelve apostles—who never wanted to be prophets and probably could not have dreamed of the mission with which Jesus would entrust them. Yet Jesus does just that: He entrusts his apostles with a prophetic mission; a difficult mission at that. They are to travel light, so to speak, with only a staff. (This would be a good skill for me to practice, as a priest of a religious order who has traveled and served in many places.) Jesus’ apostles are to be totally reliant on God and the hospitality of the people they meet. Should the people in any place “refuse to hear” the Twelve, they are to leave, shaking the dust off their feet “as a testimony against them.”
Jesus’ instructions to the Twelve highlight the difficulty of their journey and the message they are to preach. It is a message of repentance, after all. And maybe Jesus’ instruction to his apostles to shake the dust from their feet should some people not receive their message well especially calls to mind the difficulty of the apostles’ journey and message. Nowadays, like many good Biblical sayings, though, “shake the dust from your feet” has become a convenient, catchy phrase: Do not let a disagreement, or somebody’s ill reception of a message we want to communicate, bother us; simply move on. But, whenever I hear this Gospel, with this instruction of Jesus to his apostles, I try to understand it as a challenge to listen more attentively, especially as a priest and especially to people who disagree or are not receptive, for whatever reason, to my idea or message. I think a key prophetic skill for today might be to develop this reflex to listen; not to misunderstand “shake the dust from your feet” as an excuse not to listen to those with whom we differ (or even find disagreeable).
Another key characteristic of a prophet, if we look at Jesus’ Apostles, or Amos in the Old Testament, is that a true prophet recognizes that prophecy is a gift and a commissioning from God. Amos was not a professional prophet of a royal court, somebody who wanted to be a prophet. In fact, God called him to prophesy on foreign soil to a king and people who were not receptive to his message. The same was true of Jesus’ Apostles, in many ways. To what extent is the same true of us?
This may sound far-fetched to many people (maybe less so within this group), but God calls each of us, in virtue of our baptism, to be prophetic. In baptism, each and every one of us is anointed, as Christ himself was, “Priest, Prophet, and King.” This does not necessarily mean that we will accomplish great feats of faith, or be great and powerful communicators or educators of our faith, although some of us will be or are already.
Ultimately, a prophet by definition is one who speaks for God. Our speaking (or acting, or listening) in the place of God, impelled by the call of God, may lead us to communicate a message that is unpopular, in a place or time where we will be dismissed as strange or even ridiculed. This was Amos’ reality, as he preached faithfulness to one God to the unreceptive ears of Israel’s king and his court. Our prophetic baptismal calling may be more like that of Jesus’ first apostles, whom Jesus sent forth to preach repentance (similarly to how Amos was sent forth but, in the apostles’ case, they worked more as a team or in small groups than the more solitary prophets of the Old Testament, like Amos, did), but also to console and to heal the sick. More often, we will live out our prophetic mission in unassuming ways, making God known and heard through small everyday acts of kindness and mercy.
There are perhaps countless ways to live our prophetic calling from God, but each of us holds in common a baptismal calling to act, speak, listen—to do all we do—in a way that makes God most present in our world. And, as the letter to the Ephesians reminds us, we did not choose this prophetic calling from God, but God has chosen us for a purpose. God has chosen us “in Christ,” not only in baptism but “before the foundation of the world.” This is remarkable language from Ephesians!
In whatever particular way we live our prophetic calling from God, we can be assured, Ephesians says, that we have been blessed “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” We are called, yet also equipped with every blessing, to be God’s prophets in our time: To be God’s ears that listen, God’s mouth that speaks, God’s hands that work; that heal; that console, God’s feet that carry us to each encounter with God’s people, while we trust fully in God’s strength and blessings to see our prophetic journey through.
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