The Prophetic
Reflections on the Lectionary for January 28th
When I was a kid, my favorite part of going to the grocery store was standing in line to check out. Back then bar codes were a few years short of becoming popular, so usually checking out took a long time, as the cashier had to manually type in the prices for every single item. When it came time to pay, most people had to pull out a checkbook and write out a check, and the whole thing took forever. (At least there were no self-checkouts).
But all of that time meant that there were lots of opportunities to look at the products lining the checkout lane—the store’s last-gasp effort to get you to buy something, if only out of boredom, to fill the time while the person in front of you was loading their stuff onto the conveyor belt. I knew better than to ask for one of the candy bars or Cokes that were there; my mother was a big no-sugar kind of person. The same was true for the single-serving bags of chips. But the real treat of the checkout lane was free, anyway: the tabloids. I have never bought a tabloid newspaper in my life, but I have read the covers of thousands. When I was a kid, they fascinated me: salacious claims about celebrities and British royalty, strange photos of supposed extraterrestrials, images of politicians looking guilty of something, and of course bold headlines about prophecies. This last category was my favorite. There were prophecies about the Russians, prophecies about Saddam Hussein, prophecies about Princess Diana, and prophecies about—yes—barcodes. The breathless cover copy claimed that some ancient manuscript had predicted Reagan’s recession or Bush’s Maine vacation, or that a stone unearthed somewhere had been deciphered, and it all had something to do with Michael Jackson. I loved it. The person who emerged most fully from those tabloids, and yet remained completely mysterious, was Nostradamus. Whenever I saw his odd bearded face on a tabloid cover, I knew I was in for a ride. Nostradamus was cited as an authority for everything from millenarian speculation to the stock market to the Detroit Pistons, and I began to think of this dead 16th-century French guy as some sort of 20th-century oracle, giving us information (and killer headlines) from beyond the grave.
My earliest ideas about prophets were formed in the mold of Nostradamus. I imagined two things about prophets at once: that prophets told us things about the future, and that more often than not prophets were full of crap. That seemed to be the case with Nostradamus, anyway, and Nostradamus seemed to be the paradigmatic prophet, based on my survey of tabloids. So, I reasoned, prophecy was the practice of giving unreliable information about the future—predicting the future, but not in any way that could really be described as useful. Entrtaining, maybe, but not useful. Prophets were mysterious charlatans—meant for amusement in the tabloid sense, but probably not to be taken seriously.
That definition is a long way, obviously, from the prophets in the Bible—though the tabloids were not above conflating their version of prophecy with “biblical prophecy” and claiming wild things about the future based on narrow readings of obscure verses. But it strikes me that one of the texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for January 28th, Deuteronomy 18:15-20, presupposes some of the same questions and conclusions that I was running through standing in those checkout lanes in the 1980s. The framing of Deuteronomy is that we are reading the words that Moses spoke to the gathered nation of Israel—that the book is in Moses’ own voice. (Modern scholars see in Deuteronomy, like most books of the Bible, evidence of many authors and editors, and in the case of Deuteronomy there is considerable evidence that what we have is not a straightforward transcript of any remarks Moses might have made). It’s important to remember that Moses is the purported speaker, as we read this part of Deuteronomy 18, because of the role of the first person singular in the passage: the speaker wants the hearer to consider “a prophet like me.” This whole section is a meditation on prophets and their role in Israel’s story, and the speaker (Moses, if we follow the book’s conceit) is using himself as a model.
Although it can be hard to pick up on this as 21st-century people, there is a bit of an argument going on in these words, and the author (in the voice of Moses) is taking a side in a debate. In several ancient near eastern contexts, not just Israel, people held roles that looked a lot like prophets. Contrary to the tabloid Nostradamus-style hype, these prophets did not exist to tell the future—at least not primarily. There were fortune-tellers for that, and prophets were not fortune-tellers. They did sometimes predict the future, but only in the same way that an op-ed author does, or that a politician does: “If we do X, then Y will happen.” Instead of prophets’ main role being the telling of the future for the sake of telling the future, prophets’ roles were to provide an analysis of society and the powers-that-be behind it, and to critique power publicly as a corrective to its actions. They spoke for God, providing God’s perspective on social and religious life. So, in ancient Israel, prophets would often point out economic injustice or religious apostasy, and they would warn that such actions, if left unchecked, would lead to ruin. It’s not unlike people today prophesying climate disaster or national-debt crises: they are not predicting that those things will happen inevitably, but they are warning that they would happen, if nothing changes.
In some ancient near eastern contexts, then, prophecy became institutionalized. Guilds of prophets organized themselves to serve in these kinds of roles (sort of like the editorial boards of newspapers, maybe), and they offered perspectives on society that were critical of power while also being allied with it. Prophetic guilds existed to critique the status quo, but as institutions, they were also invested in the status quo. I think that’s part of what Deuteronomy 18:20 presumes—that prophets might stray from the core role of speaking for the God of Israel, and that they might instead serve some other God, or that they might deliver messages meant to serve their own interests rather than the interests of God or Israel.
Moses, in this passage, is advocating a slightly different model of prophecy. Instead of institutionalized guilds of prophets that might be hereditary or reliant on insider networks to fill their ranks, Moses is predicting that “the LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people.” This is not an institutional model of leadership, but a charismatic model of leadership. It imagines prophetic authority belonging to individuals rather than groups, and it envisions this authority to speak and lead as coming directly from God, not from the sanction of a group or guild. The “like me” in Moses’ words is doing a lot of work. Moses was an outsider in many ways, chosen not by birth or vote but by divine appointment, and able to perform his tasks because of constant communication with God, in spite of and not because of his connections to power. Moses here is looking forward to another such prophet, but he is also looking backward, and remarking on how his own career had changed something about the way the people might expect to hear from God. In the future after Moses, prophets of both varieties would flourish, but Moses is raising the possibility that prophetic gifts might sometimes flow directly from God.
Today we have narrowed the category of prophecy considerably. The Nostradamus definition of prophecy is the one that most people hold instinctively—as someone who tells us secret knowledge about the future. This shows up a lot of times in people’s reflections on Revelation; the whole Left Behind series was premised on the mistaken view that Revelation is in the business of telling us about future events. (It’s not). We think that prophecy is the same thing as fortune-telling or looking into a crystal ball. But when we define prophecy that way, we lose a lot of its power.
At the Iliff School of Theology, I co-direct the Doctor of Ministry in Prophetic Leadership degree program, which is a professional doctorate for people who are in leadership positions in ministry and allied/comparable positions. As part of that program, I have had the opportunity to think a lot about prophetic leadership and to be a part of a lot of conversations about it. It has been really good to have students who are asking what “prophetic” might mean in their own contexts. What does prophetic look like in a shrinking congregation? What does it look like in hospice chaplaincy, or in a hospital setting? What is prophetic about a community that works across lines of difference? What might prophetic mean in the non-profit world or in a denominational administrative office? Asking those kinds of questions about prophecy and the prophetic helps to take it out of the world of fortune-telling and into the world of social critique and social change. What is broken about our world, and where is that brokenness leading us? How might we intervene in the cycles of exploitation and neglect that move in our systems? Where is our behavior leading us, and how can we choose to move in a different direction? What does the voice of the divine sound like? If we take seriously Moses’ prediction that God is raising up prophets, how can we recognize them? In the DMin program, we help students do research and reflection on those questions and others, and we help them discern for themselves what prophetic leadership looks like in their context.
Those kinds of questions don’t show up on tabloid covers, but they do have the potential to guide our world. Those are the kinds of questions that prophetic voices ask of our systems and cultures and institutions, and they lead to the kind of critiques that can lead to change. As Deuteronomy says, we can expect prophets to emerge among us, and we can expect them to tell us something about how the world might be better than it is. We can expect them to call us toward something new, something more just, something more aligned with flourishing and peace, toward a future that offers more than the past.