Prophecy and Revelation
Reflections on the Lectionary for July 7th
Before we get to the lectionary discussion for the week, a couple of programming notes.
First, this is the last week to register for my second short non-credit class of the summer, Following the Lectionary Postcolonially. The class is focused on reading the Lectionary texts for Advent 2024 and Lent 2025 in a postcolonial perspective. The class runs for three weeks July 8th through 29th and it meets asynchronously, so you can tackle the discussions and readings whenever it's convenient for you. And the cost is way, way less than most graduate seminary classes. Continuing education credit is available! At the end you'll have the option to write a short paper OR create an educational or worship plan for either Advent or Lent. Wouldn't you like to get that planning done ahead of time?
Second, I have several Sundays in July and August available for speaking engagements with congregations, either in person or over Zoom. If you’d like to know more about potential topics, open dates, and fees, please get in touch!
Now, on to the lectionary texts for this week….
One of the threads running through the Bible, from start to finish, is the theme of revelation. How is knowledge mediated from God to people? Who speaks for God, and how does God make things known to humans? The Bible provides a few different answers to that question, and the lectionary for July 7th offers us a chance to reflect on several of them.
One of the most common biblical tropes for conveying divine knowledge is prophecy, and in Ezekiel 2:1-5, we see an instance of a prophetic call or charge. Ezekiel hears a voice—the voice of God, the reader is left to presume, in some form—charging him to speak on God’s behalf. But this prophetic call is already predetermined and conditioned with the history of divine revelation and relationship to Israel. In this passage, God calls Israel “impudent and stubborn,” and “rebellious.” The context of the book of Ezekiel is important here; Ezekiel was tasked with delivering prophecies to Israel around the time of the destruction of the temple and the deportation into exile in Babylon. In that circumstance, God’s claim that Israel is rebellious and unfaithful takes on a heightened meaning; the book of Ezekiel has God claiming, in the midst of the nation’s destruction and scattering, that Israel is somehow responsible for its own tragedies. God has not abandoned Israel, the book is claiming; Israel has abandoned God.
In the middle of such destruction, Ezekiel gets charged with speaking a word to the exiled people. What’s interesting about this short selection, though, is that it is a prophecy without any real content. While the book goes on to record prophetic oracles delivered to Israel, in this section, near the beginning, the fact of prophecy is supposed to be enough. In 2:5, God tells Ezekiel to declare, “Thus says the Lord GOD,” but does not specify what it is, exactly, the Lord GOD says. And then in 2:5, the text claims that the reception of the prophecy is almost beside the point: “Whether they hear or refuse to hear…they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.” The claim of the book of Ezekiel, and the claim God makes in it, is that the act of prophecy alone is evidence of something. But of what is it evidence?
I am not sure, but I wonder whether it is supposed to be evidence of an ongoing relationship between God and Israel. After all, that must have been one of the most pressing questions, in the midst of exile following a stinging military defeat: has God abandoned us? The call of Ezekiel here seems designed to reassure any Israelites who might still be listening that the Babylonian exile was not an ending, and that the God of Israel would continue to show up in their lives. Later in the book of Ezekiel there would be specific prophetic oracles, but here at the beginning, Ezekiel’s task mostly seems to be to simply let the Israelites know that God is still checking in on them.
Meanwhile, the sixth chapter of Mark offers a different perspective on prophecy. For starters, the definition of “prophecy” seems to have shifted. While Ezekiel was charged with transmitting God’s words, thus-says-the-Lord-style, Jesus is described as teaching and doing deeds of power. Certainly one can imagine overlap between those two roles, but they really are different emphases. Ezekiel is portrayed as a mouthpiece for God, but Jesus is portrayed as a center of wisdom in his own right. And yet, in the passage Jesus refers to himself (in an abstract third-person kind of way) as a prophet. How do we reconcile that?
I see this as an attempt by Mark to reconcile two things. First, Mark is aware (and wants readers to be aware) that Jesus spent most of his time teaching and performing deeds (like healings), and not transmitting oracles on God’s behalf. Second, Mark is aware that Jesus was rejected in the same way prophets were sometimes rejected, both locally in his hometown and ultimately in Jerusalem as well, and Mark wants to link that rejection to the longer tradition of prophetic rejection in Israel. Mark calls Jesus a prophet in this passage (or, more accurately, Mark shows us Jesus calling himself a prophet) because it allows the reader to think about Jesus alongside other figures from Israel’s history whose mission has appeared to fail while actually succeeding.
The difference between the rejection of Jesus in Mark 6 and the rejection of other prophets, though, is really interesting. Jesus isn’t rejected in his hometown because the people preferred to go on being wicked (as is often alleged in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible) or because they were too busy to listen. Instead, Jesus is rejected in his hometown because they knew him too well there. That’s so fascinating! It’s not the unique and special nature of Jesus that makes the people dismiss him, it’s his commonness—the fact that they know his mom and dad and siblings. This passage seems to be less a commentary on divine revelation and prophecy, and more of a way to talk about that strange experience of making it everywhere except the place you’re from. The culminating line from the episode, spoken by Jesus, has even become a modern-day proverb: “Prophets are not without honor except in their hometown.” Probably many readers can relate to that feeling. No matter how successful or accomplished you might be, among the people who knew you when you were young and anonymous, you’ll always be who you were then. Mark needed to explain why this had happened to Jesus, and this story does a tidy job of providing an explanation.
That brings us to the third instance of revelation found in this week’s lectionary, and by far the strangest: Paul’s comments in 2 Corinthians 12. Here we aren’t thinking about prophecy, by a different kind of revelation, one informed by first-century Jewish understandings of divine experiences. “I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do know; God knows,” Paul writes. “And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.”
Paul does things like this sometimes, casually dropping lore and then moving along without explanation. (See 1 Corinthians 15:29, for example). In this case, Paul is in the middle of a longer discussion on boasting (of which he has been accused by his opponents in Corinth), and he mentions this divine experience as part of that argument. Some scholars think that Paul is talking about a friend in this passage, as a literal reading of 12:2 would suggest. But other scholars think that Paul is employing a roundabout way of talking about himself, as a way to distance his ego from his experiences (which serves his broader point about not boasting). Either way, the ideas found here—third heaven, trips to Paradise—are probably unfamiliar to most of us.
Most likely, Paul is describing a revelatory experience, his own or someone else’s, in which the person received a vision of or journey to heaven. Heavenly visions and journeys are a common feature of Jewish apocalyptic literature of that period—Revelation is the most prominent example—and Paul seems to be describing just such an experience. He hedges his bets on whether it was a vision or a journey, by repeating twice that he does not know whether the person’s (or his own) body was transported to heaven, or whether it was only a vision. But the reader is definitely supposed to come away with the sense that something divine has been revealed.
But notice that in contrast to Ezekiel, who received a charge to prophesy but no actual prophetic content, Paul seems to know the content of divine revelations but cannot speak them: the person “heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” This is secret knowledge, privileged and private, which is quite different and even opposite from the kinds of divine oracles that prophets were supposed to proclaim. Secrecy and hiddenness were common aspects of apocalyptic thought and literature; “apocalypse” comes from a Greek word that literally means “unveiling” or “revelation,” making known a hidden thing. So Paul’s comments in 2 Corinthians seem to come right out of that tradition. So too with the reference to a “third heaven,” as Jewish thought in the first century often imagined tiered cosmologies with multiple layers of both heaven and hell.
The takeaway from all three of these passages is that biblical texts are always imagining how God might be trying to communicate with humans—under what circumstances, through what mouthpieces, conveying what kinds of knowledge. Divine revelation shows up in the Bible as an object of desire; the text assumes that the reader will want to know what God has to say, even if the people in the text don’t always seem to want to know. Perhaps this is because the Bible itself is often thought of as just this kind of revelation from the divine, or perhaps it’s because divine revelation is so frustratingly elusive and rare—we want to know whether God is still interested in talking to us.
One task for us today, then, is to ask whether God is indeed still interested, and if so, what God might have to say. Some traditions hold that God speaks through representatives of the church, and others say that God speaks through scripture. Some claim divine revelation to individuals, through science and other forms of knowledge, or through divine messengers like angels. In that sense, it’s not only the Bible that thinks about divine revelation as an object of desire, it’s modern religious traditions and religious people who think that way too. The lectionary for this week affords us an opportunity to ask: is God still speaking? And if so, how, to whom, and what is God saying?
Or, as I have said, "If God is still speaking, will we shut up long enough to listen?"