We continue sharing from Richard’s 1980 series on the Hebrew prophets. In this talk, Richard focuses on the prophet Isaiah and the meaning of biblical faith:

Isaiah [the author of Isaiah 1–39] is above all else the prophet of faith. He begins to define the quality of faith and what it means to trust in God. It’s a whole new capacity for God and life…. Biblical faith, especially for Isaiah, is a quality of being, a quality of perception.

We might try to describe it as a type of internal authority that comes from listening to everything, a going beyond fear so that one becomes intimate with everything. Such people know the truth out of which they speak. They have somehow heard Divine Love speak their name. I don’t know how to describe such mysteries. It’s like there’s a place within us where those names have become one, God’s name and our name. That’s the source of the authority out of which we speak, that we know God has called us by name and we know God has been revealed to us. We know God and we know God knows us. We begin to draw our authority from that point.

That’s the only way that we can stand firmly in this world. Otherwise, we’re always searching outside of ourselves for the approval of others, the applause of others, or some group to find our identity. And so we don’t have to have a personal identity. Faith is obeying your deepest heart. It’s being true to your deepest self.

God offers Isaiah a loving and surprising response to the people’s stuck faith:

In the middle of Isaiah, the prophet seems to be repeating his basic belief and testimony. He calls it the precious cornerstone of his teaching, which is “whoever has faith shall not be shaken” (Isaiah 28:16). Now we’re beginning to see why Isaiah is called the prophet of faith. God says, “I will make justice the measure, integrity the plumb line” for those who live this radical faith (Isaiah 28:17).

“Yahweh has said: Because this people approaches me only in words, honors me only with lip service while its heart is far from me, and my religion, as far as it is concerned, is nothing but human commandment, a lesson memorized” (Isaiah 29:13). And here’s God’s response right after: I’m going to go on acting in surprising and wondrous fashion, “being prodigal of prodigious prodigies with this people,” as The Jerusalem Bible translates it (29:14). God is saying, as it were, “You don’t know my love. You’re satisfied with verbal religion, with lip service. The only way I know how to get you out of it is to love you more.”

How beautiful! That’s always the way of God. God shakes a finger at the people and yet says, “The way I’ll call you out of it is by loving you even more than I love you now.”

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Gentle Jesus,

You’ve been teaching me that there is no randomness about my life: Here and Now comprise the coordinates of my daily life. The present moment is not only the point at which time intersects eternity, it is the place where I encounter You—my eternal Savior. Every moment of every day is alive with Your glorious Presence! Help me to keep my thoughts focused on You—enjoying Your Presence here and now. I confess that I let many moments slip through my fingers, half-lived. I neglect the present by worrying about the future or longing for a better time and place. Please open my eyes and awaken my heart so I can see all that this day contains! I want You to be involved in everything I do—equipping me to do my work heartily. Working collaboratively with You lightens my load and enables me to enjoy what I’m doing. I find that the more time I spend communicating with You, the less I worry. This frees me to let Your Spirit direct my steps—guiding my feet into the way of Peace. In Your guiding Name, Amen

LUKE 12:25–26; Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life[ a]? 26 Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry 

COLOSSIANS 3:23 NASB; Whatever you do, do your work [ a]heartily, as for the Lord and not for people, 24 knowing that it is from the Lord that you will receive the reward [ b]of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.

JOHN 10:10 AMPC; The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows).

LUKE 1:79 NKJV; To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, To guide our feet into the way of peace.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 49). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Huldah: A Trustworthy Prophet

Author and podcaster Kat Armas writes of truth telling as a valued part of her upbringing and finds support for this way of being in the Scriptures: 

I learned very young that when there’s a problem, you confront it. It’s how you get by…. For me, confrontation has always been equated with intimacy…. It wasn’t until I left my context, my culture, that I realized how rare it is to value confrontation and truth telling, and what length many people will go to in order to silence the prophets in our midst.

I imagine Huldah the prophet held to similar values.

Her story is found in 2 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 34. It’s not surprising that we don’t know much about her or hear of her often. I wonder if her story goes untold because it’s hard to reconcile a truth-telling woman, a prophet who instructs a man—the king—in the way of God, with the narratives that are forced on women by much of the church. Some in the church tell women that they can’t lead men, that the Bible says so, but what about Huldah? She was called by God to tell the truth….

I wish we knew more about Huldah’s calling…. What was it like for a woman to be called to such a powerful position of spiritual leadership and authority? Did she have a vision that empowered her like Isaiah did, or was she terrified and trying to get out of it like Jonah? I wonder if she was young like Josiah, who became king as a child and eventually went to Huldah for spiritual counsel. Were there women in her life, abuelitas [grandmothers] who discipled her, told her about her antepasados [ancestors] and everything they went through in Egypt, in the desert? Did she have role models like Miriam, a woman without husband or children, the first woman to ever be called a prophet? Did Huldah look up to the way Miriam led Israel in song and dance and to how they were committed to her—refusing to march in the wilderness until she was healed from her disease (Numbers 12:15)?

Armas describes how Josiah the king sought out the prophet Huldah “to receive direction from God through the prophet”: 

And Huldah did just that—boldly. She warned of the coming destruction, declaring that the written word they found was indeed God’s true word. She also delivered good news, validating Josiah’s repentance on first reading the book. She let the messengers know that Josiah’s actions would bring forth peace. After Huldah’s word got back to him, Josiah responded by continuing his reform. [See 2 Kings 22:12–20; 2 Chronicles 34:19–33].

Huldah’s prophetic words shifted national policy. Her commitment to telling God’s truth—even and especially the hard truth—specifically to men in power, changed the course of history.

The Feelings of God

In his 1980 talks on the Hebrew prophets, Father Richard identified the passion of the prophets, which is also the passion of God: 

The prophets provide a journey into the heart of God. Their images and words and dramas oftentimes seem exaggerated and absolutist. These are somehow an attempt to draw humankind into the pathos, the feeling, the intensity, the pain, even, that characterize the heart of God.

If we look at it too logically, we may say, “Well, that’s a misuse of words.” We might say that God doesn’t have pain, feeling, desire, or anger. Yet prophets dare to use those words and images because the prophets are speaking to us. The prophet knows that these are words we can understand, that we can enter into, and that will somehow assimilate us into the heart of God….

Let’s come at it the other way around. We know and we feel; if we are children of God, then somehow what characterizes our heart and humanity must be reflected in who God is. Maybe the only way to get a handle on who God is, is to speak of desire, to speak of anger, to speak of longing, to speak of love. And so we dare to do it, and the prophet dares to do it.

Scholar and activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) describes the shared experience of feeling between God and a prophet:

The fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos, a communion with the divine consciousness…. The typical prophetic state of mind is one of being taken up into the heart of the divine pathos. [1]

Richard continues: 

Prophets don’t try to be logical. Perhaps this is why prophets get closer to the Divine Reality than many of the more rational and prudent, logical and theological approaches to God. If we’re looking for prudence and balance, we don’t read the prophets. That’s not their vocation. They’re not called to be that. In a world that is so one-sided, always looking for the self-preserving, careful, cautious, and protective way, the prophet feels they must stand way over at a distance and pull humanity to the other side. They must help humanity experience the pathos of God, the pain, the feeling, the longing, the desire of God….

If teachers give us the ideas of God, then prophets give us the feelings of God. This helps us see Jesus as both prophet and teacher. Jesus speaks the word of God, the ideas of God, but combines with them the feelings of God. That’s what it means to have a whole understanding of reality. We know so much more than we understand, at least if we’re listening. If we’re learning how to listen, we know so much more than we understand. What the prophets do is help us to know what we know.

A Life of Relationship

Richard Rohr speaks in his 1980 recorded series on the Hebrew prophets about the communal and social emphasis of their message: 

What the prophet does is lead the Jewish religion into being a social experience….  The prophets keep Judaism social.

Much of modern religion is individualistic, spiritualized instead of social. Prophetic words only speak out of the context of peoplehood, out of the context of community. It’s a call to the covenant people to live the covenant and be the people of the covenant. To be faithful to the pledge that God has made to God’s people. For the most part, the prophets’ teaching is not individualistic; it’s social. Their understanding isn’t, “This is right for me; I must do this. My conscience tells me this.” Much more, they speak of our conscience. There’s a social conscience, what is right for the people. The prophets are convinced that what is right and good for the people as a whole will be right for the individual.

Ironically—and this will seem like a paradox—out of that sense of peoplehood, out of that sense of community comes a strong tradition of the importance of the individual. I know that sounds contradictory, but that’s exactly what happens. A true sense of community creates a strong sense of individual personhood…. True individuals create true community. And true community creates true individuals. They are not conflicting. Because we’ve so often experienced bad community and individualism instead of true personhood, we see them as somehow in conflict. The prophet does not. So the prophet’s sense of Judaism is of a social religion that calls hearers to peoplehood, to togetherness, to relatedness. Only in relatedness can we understand relatedness to God.

The life of the Spirit in the Hebrew Scriptures is largely a life of relationship. Those who can be in relationship can learn how to appropriately relate to the other, not just to the self. We’re caught right now in a very psychological age where we’re coming very close to defining salvation as self-realization, as therapeutic experience, as self-knowledge. It’s all an internal dialogue.

In fact, the life of the Spirit is a life of relatedness and relationship. The prophet leads us into that life of relationship to be in union with nature, the moment, the person, the prayer, the community. As soon as those moments of relationship are cut off, we cut off the possibility of community, and we cut off the possibility of being a people of any real depth. Certainly, we cut ourselves off from what I think the Jewish and Christian traditions offer us, which is a call to relatedness. God leads us further and further into that relatedness, into an experience of intimacy with that with which we are in relationship. Because of that experience of intimacy with the center, with God, with the Creator, with Life, gradually the scaffolding of fear and self-protection falls away. We’re hopefully finally able to be intimate with everything.

Mercy, Justice, and Walking Humbly

“You have been told, O mortal, what is good and what YHWH requires of you: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” —Micah 6:8

Scholar and retreat leader Megan McKenna deepens our understanding of God’s desire for us through the prophet Micah. For McKenna, Micah’s simple and challenging verse reveals the essence of what the prophets are about: 

According to God, this is life. This is the call of the prophets in a nutshell, the meat at the heart of their very existence. The words used are significant: “Do justice”—the Hebrew word mishpat means more than specific acts of justice. It defines God’s order in the world; it is the covenant guide for living in community; and it is the memory of God’s words and deeds past and present and the people’s response in gratitude toward one another. In a word it says, Be the Torah; do God’s justice; imitate God in your life.…

“Do justice” means to be faithful as God is faithful, holy as God is holy, to set those in bondage free, to hear compassionately the cries of those in slavery, to do for one’s neighbor what God has so graciously done for you. It is the teaching of the Torah, the source of abundant life. These two words—Do justice—point to the way of God and simply say: walk in it! Whatever the concept of justice might be, it is only by doing acts of justice, by solidly standing with those in need of justice, and by resisting injustice that justice can become a reality.

The second demand is “Love mercy” (or “Love tenderly”). The Hebrew word hesed, compassion, means coming to the rescue of the poor, the outcast, the alien, the slave, the powerless, hearing the cries of those in misery, giving love that is faithful, sustaining, enduring. It is the way God loves [God’s] people, and God’s people are to return that love by loving one another. This urgent command shoots right to the heart of every individual and to the community. [1]

Howard Thurman (1899–1981) asks what it means to walk humbly with God, the third of God’s requirements to Micah: 

How do you walk humbly with God? How do you? How do you walk humbly with anybody?… [By] coming to grips with who I am, what I am as accurately and as fully as possible: a clear-eyed appraisal of myself. And in the light of the dignity of my own sense of being I walk with God step by step as [God] walks with me. This is I, with my weaknesses and my strength, with my abilities and my liabilities; this is I, a human being myself! And it is that that God salutes. So that the more I walk with God and God walks with me, the more I come into the full-orbed significance of who I am and what I am. That is to walk humbly with God. [2]

Father Richard considers how a balance of unconditional and conditional love serves growth in the first half of life:  

The only happy people I’ve met are those who have found some way to serve. Such folks are not preoccupied with self-image, success, and power. Many of us began with traditional rules, discipline, and structure that created a kind of compression chamber, often based on exclusion. As we grow, the chamber becomes tight and oppressive, so we begin to practice what we call “the sacred no” against self-serving laws, traditions, and cultural practices that pose as the will of God. We’re no longer willing to prop up the status quo and believe that is all there is to life. 

It seems many people raised in our culture in the last few decades grew up backwards by beginning “liberal.” This leaves the unconverted ego in the position of decider. I don’t think we do our children any favors by raising them without boundaries or rules and largely letting them decide for themselves what is right for them. Basically, we’re asking them to start from zero. In an overreaction to the generation before them, parents and the church have been trying hard to love unconditionally. I know this from doing it myself with the young people in the New Jerusalem Community in my early years as a priest. I endlessly preached about God’s unconditional love. To be honest, although we drew thousands of young people, most did not take this very far in terms of deep and lasting transformation or service to the world.  

To borrow an idea from Erich Fromm’s classic book The Art of Loving, I believe that the healthiest people are those who received from their two parents and early authority figures a combination of unconditional love and conditional love. This seems to be true of so many effective and influential people, like St. Francis, John Muir, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mother Teresa. I know my siblings and I received conditional love from our mother and unconditional love from our father. We all admit now that Mom’s demanding love served us very well later in life, although we sure fought her when we were young. And we were glad Daddy was there to balance her out. 

It appears we need a goad, a wall to butt up against to create a proper ego structure and a strong identity. Such a foil is the way we internalize our own deeper values, educate our feeling function, and dethrone our own narcissism. We all need to internalize the sacred no to our natural egocentricity. It seems we need a certain level of frustration, a certain amount of not having our needs met. Then we realize there are other people who also have needs and desires and feelings. As my mother told me, “Dickie, your rights end at the end of your nose; that’s where somebody else’s nose begins.”  

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Sarah Young; Jesus Listens

My living Lord, By day You direct Your Love; at night Your song is with me—for You are the God of my life. Knowing that You are in charge of everything is such a great comfort! During the day, You command Your Love to bless me in countless ways. So I’ll be on the lookout for the many good things You place along my path—searching for Your blessings and thanking You for each one I find. Help me not to be discouraged by the hard things I encounter but to accept them as part of living in a deeply fallen world. I rejoice that Your song is with me throughout the night as You lovingly watch over me. If I am wakeful, I can use this time to seek Your Face and enjoy Your peaceful Presence. A tender intimacy with You develops when I remember You on my bed—meditating on You in the night watches. Whether I am waking or sleeping, You are always present with me. For You are indeed the God of my life! In Your blessed Name, Jesus, Amen

PSALM 42:8; By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me—

2 CORINTHIANS 4:16–17; Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

PSALM 27:8 NKJV; When You said, “Seek My face,” My heart said to You, “Your face, Lord, I will seek.” 9 Do not hide Your face from me; Do not turn Your servant away in anger; You have been my help; Do not leave me nor forsake me, O God of my salvation.

PSALM 63:6–7 NKJV When I remember You on my bed, I meditate on You in the night watches. Because You have been my help, Therefore, in the shadow of Your wings I will rejoice.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 35). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

The First Season of Faith 

CAC teacher and author Brian McLaren writes about the passionate innocence that characterized his “first half of life” as a young Christian:

Many of us have memories of when our spiritual lives first came alive—the season of our “first love.” For example, in those initial months after my [powerful spiritual] experience … I felt the Bible speak to me as never before. The simplest word or phrase would stir my soul…. I started wearing a big wooden cross around my neck, and I carried a big, green Living Bible on top of my high-school books—in hopes that someone would ask me about either of them, so I could “bear witness” to my exuberant, contagious faith. I loved to insert “Praise the Lord!” into my speech as often as possible—which elicited “Amen!” from my Christian friends and surprise or annoyance from my other friends. Speaking of my Christian friends, we could often be found huddling in a stairwell … praying for a miraculous intervention of some sort. And our prayers, it seemed to us, were answered way beyond the statistical norm. We seemed to “live and move and have our being” [Acts 17:28] in the holy glow of God’s presence. It was spiritual springtime, and we assumed it would never end.

McLaren charts growth in the spiritual life as coming to greater fullness when we move beyond the simplicity of that first season: 

Just as all higher mathematics depends on learning basic arithmetic, and just as all more sophisticated music depends on mastering the basics of tempo, melody, and harmony, the spiritual life depends on learning well the essential lessons of this first season, Simplicity. If these lessons aren’t learned well, practitioners will struggle in later seasons. But if in due time this season doesn’t give way to the next, the spiritual life can grow stagnant and even toxic. Nearly all of us in this dynamic season of Simplicity tend to share a number of characteristics. We see the world in simple dualist terms: we are the good guys who follow the good authority figures and we have the right answers; they are the bad guys who consciously or unconsciously fight on the wrong side of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. We feel a deep sense of identity and belonging in our in-group…. This simple, dualist faith gives us great confidence.

This confidence, of course, has a danger, as the old Bob Dylan classic “With God on Our Side” makes clear: “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.” [1] The same sense of identification with an in-group that generates a warm glow of belonging and motivates sacrificial action for us can sour into intolerance, hatred, and even violence toward them. And the same easy, black-and-white answers that comfort and reassure us now may later seem arrogant, naive, ignorant, and harmful, if we don’t move beyond Simplicity in the fullness of time.

Making Room for Something New 

In a 2004 conference with Richard Rohr, author and retreat leader Paula D’Arcy spoke of her childhood kitchen table as a symbol of the security of her first half of life:

I had a dream [at a retreat] … and in that dream, I was back in the home in which I was raised, and my siblings and my parents and I were all sitting around the kitchen table, which was the hub of our home. And then in the dream, suddenly the table was just gone. It had vanished…. When the table was removed, it made room for truth. Now there is space for something entirely new to happen….

At that table, the first part of my journey happened. At that table, we sat, and my sisters and I were quizzed on the Baltimore Catechism, and we learned the laws, and we learned the rules. It’s very interesting to think how at that table, I first heard the question, “Who is God?” and “Why were we created?” And we parroted back to my parents the lesson book, the things that we were learning. At that table, we passed back and forth to my parents our report cards and sat hoping that they were good enough. At that table, we learned the values that had given my parents’ life shape.

D’Arcy lost her husband and young daughter in a car accident when she was pregnant with their second child. She describes what it meant to sit at that same table with the reality of immense loss, and then to discover in her dream that the table is eventually taken away:

Because that table once held all the answers, it held all the security. It was the frame, and it was the root of my life.… That table was so many things in that life; and then it became a table where I went in my grief and asked a lot of the questions about the meaning of life, and the extent of the darkness, and how a person got through that amount of pain.

So the dream at that retreat was significant to me, when I dreamt that the table was now removed. It had served its purpose. It had held me while I went through the first half of my journey. It had provided all of the things that were meant to be provided, and now the table was removed, because the journey was to go a different way. The journey was now within. Now, all the doors and all the answers and all the mystery were going to be found not at that table, but … looking through eyes that were very different, and a life that was suddenly broken open in a different way. I learned the roots of love at that table, but when the table was removed .… My litany at that table would have been, “Do I have what it takes to really love, to do the second half of the journey?”

The Task Within the Task

Father Richard introduces the first half of life and the necessary journey beyond it: 

There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life, which does not mean we do it well. The second task, I am told, is more encountered than sought; few arrive at it with much preplanning, purpose, or passion.

We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. Probably most cultures and individuals across history have been situated in the first half of their own development up to now, because it is all they had time for. We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.

But it takes us much longer to discover “the task within the task,” as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing….

Problematically, the first task invests so much of our blood, sweat, tears, and years that we often cannot imagine there is a second task, or that anything more could be expected of us. “The old wineskins are good enough,” we say, even though according to Jesus they often cannot hold the new wine. According to him, if we do not get some new wineskins, “the wine and the wineskin will both be lost” (Luke 5:37–39). The second half of life can hold some new wine because by then there should be some strong wineskins, some tested ways of holding our lives together. But that normally means that the container itself has to stretch, die in its present form, or even replace itself with something better.

Various traditions have used many metaphors to make this differentiation clear: beginner and proficient, novices and initiated, milk and meat, letter and spirit, juniors and seniors, baptized and confirmed, apprentice and master, morning and evening, “Peter when you were young … Peter when you are old” (John 21:18). Only when we have begun to live in the second half of life can we see the difference between the two. Yet the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary. We cannot do a nonstop flight to the second half of life by reading lots of books about it. Grace must and will edge us forward. “God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself.

No pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do the journey for us. If we try to skip the first journey, we will never receive its real fruits or understand its limitations.

Moving Beyond Survival 

In his talk Loving the Two Halves of Life, Richard describes the questions we focus on in the first half of life: 

I first read the phrase “first half of life” in the work of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875−1971) years ago. It made sense to me then, but I probably was too young at that point to recognize how true it would eventually become. In short—and this is my layperson’s interpretation of Carl Jung—he would say that the first half of life is the task that we think is our primary task. The second half of life is really the task within the task that a lot of people never get to because they’re so preoccupied with the first task, which is all about making money, getting an education, raising children, and paying a mortgage. It’s about tradition, law, structure, authority, and identity. It’s about why I’m significant, why I’m important, why I matter, why I’m good.

Most of us are so invested in these first-half-of-life tasks by the age of forty that we can’t imagine there’s anything more to life. But if we stay there, it remains all about me. How can I be important? How can I be safe? How can I be significant? How can I make money? How can I look good? And how can I die a happy death and go to heaven? Religion itself becomes an evacuation plan for the next life, as my friend and colleague Brian McLaren says, because we don’t see much happening of depth or significance in this world. It largely remains a matter of survival.

I’m sad to say, after fifty-five years as a priest, I think a lot of Christians have never moved beyond survival questions, security questions, even securing their future in eternity. First-half-of-life religion is an insurance plan to ensure that future. In this stage, any sense of being a part of a cosmos, of being part of a historical sweep, that God is doing something bigger and better and larger than simply saving individual souls (and my own soul in particular) is largely of no interest to us. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. That’s all the first half of life can do.

It’s clear that if someone wants to be elected to a political office in the United States or any country, all they need to do is assure people of safety. Bill Plotkin, who’s been such a wonderful influence on so many people in recent decades, speaks of the first half of life as our survival dance, and the second half of life as our sacred dance. [1] Most people never get beyond their survival dance. It’s just identity questions, boundary questions, superiority questions, and security questions. We would call them ego questions, but they’re not questions of the soul.

The soul moves beyond questions of security and importance because it has discovered that it is absolutely important.

CAC teacher Brian McLaren says that we understand Jesus more clearly when we consider him through the lineage of his Jewish faith and the Hebrew prophets:

What seems to have happened in Christian history is that we have tried to understand Jesus primarily through his descendants, meaning when we want to understand Jesus, we say, “What did Paul say about Jesus? What did Augustine say about Jesus? What did Aquinas say about Jesus? What did Martin Luther or John Calvin or John Wesley say about Jesus?” We try to understand Jesus by studying what people said after his life. I think it would be much better for us to understand Jesus forwards in the sense of, “Look at his ancestors; look at the lineage into which he came.” Does that make sense? Place Jesus in the context of his history and his story.

When we do that, we understand that for Jesus growing up as a Jew, he was entering into a realm of people like patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and the people who gave birth to a new people. Of course, we should add Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel and the others.… Then come these other figures called prophets. Moses really is seen as the first prophet and then there are many, many others, Amos maybe being almost a prototypical prophet. These are people who have some experience of listening to God and then speaking for God. They generally are confronting oppression and injustice and proclaiming liberation and warning and promise and imagination. [1]

Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, names ways Jesus’ life and actions echoed those of prophets familiar to her from her religious upbringing:

Jesus fusses at priests, just like Amos. Jesus tells parables, just like the prophet Nathan and a number of rabbis whose stories appear in postbiblical Jewish sources. Jesus heals and raises the dead; so too Elijah and Elisha. Jesus survives when children around him are slaughtered, just like Moses. I didn’t have to read Matthew 2–7 to know that the rescued baby would take a trip to Egypt, cross water in a life-changing experience, face temptation in the wilderness, ascend a mountain, and deliver comments on the Law—the pattern was already established in Shemot, the book of Exodus. [2]

In spite of many similarities between Jesus and the Jewish prophets, Levine stresses that the Gospel writers view Jesus as more than a prophet: Although Jesus himself may be perceived as heir to the legacy of Amos and Jeremiah, the Gospels present him as more than a prophet. He is, according to the Evangelists, the Son of God, who adds something new to the prophetic concern for justice. He goes well beyond the role of Isaiah and Micah, who seek what is called in Hebrew t’shuvah, return and repentance. Jesus of the Gospels seeks something new, specifically, following him. He is important not only because of what he says, but also because of who he is.

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Sarah Young

Trust is the golden pathway to heaven. When you trust Me, and do not rely on your own understanding, or circumstances, you live a surrendered and connected life and enjoy the peace that passes understanding.

John 14:1-2 Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God[ a]; believe also in me. 2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?

2Timothy 4:18 the Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. To him be glory for ever and ever.

Proverbs 3:5-6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.

The Prophet Sets It Off

Considering Jesus’ prophetic actions, Rev. Erica Williams disrupts our tendency to hear the gospel through tired ears by using the modern phrase “set it off”:  

The phrase “set it off” means to start a fight, or to get into it. We see in Jesus’s inaugural message in Luke 4:18–21 that he boldly declares he came to do just that. 

In this passage, Jesus has a sankofa moment: a moment of going back to the past to retrieve what is useful for today. He reflects on his own lineage of freedom fighters when he declares he is here to get in on what Isaiah prophesied!… Luke 4:18–19 is referring to the prophecy in Isaiah 61:1–3, which foretells that a Messiah will come to restore the Israelites from the Babylonian captivity. Announcing the good news is a theme throughout Isaiah. The people have been promised that they will be set free, and Jesus wants his people to know that he has been sent to bring liberation to them and to all people. 

Jesus was a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew who grew up in Nazareth, a town that was poor and marginalized, ruled and militarized by the Roman Empire.… Peasant societies were marked by an enormous gulf between rural peasants and urban ruling elites. They were politically oppressive, economically exploitative, and religiously legitimated.

Jesus confronts unjust systems and demonstrates in word and deed what God’s love looks like:  

Jesus, who was a peasant himself, saw all of these things happening to his people. He knew that he could not be a chaplain of the empire but was sent to be a prophet of God—one anointed by God and the people to do the work of love, justice, and liberation.  

We see Jesus set it off in a nonviolent way during his ministry: he gives sight to Bartimaeus [Mark 10:46–52], and he stops a woman from being stoned to death for adultery by telling her accusers that anyone without sin could be the first to throw a stone (John 8:7). In Jesus’s final week before being crucified (during the Passover, which celebrates the Jewish people’s defeat of slavery), Jesus goes into the temple. There he sets it off by flipping the tables of the money changers and declaring that God’s house is a place of prayer and not a den of thieves [Mark 11:15–17].  

A man considered a nobody set it off by showing radical love and revolutionary compassion and by speaking truth to power. Jesus turned the world right side up. The empire thought it had shut Jesus down by lynching him, but all it did was plant a seed.  

That seed has produced a great harvest of freedom fighters such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Josephine Baker, Septima Clark, and Martin Luther King Jr.… Each of us is being called to set it off. It does not matter what your pedigree is: God is calling you to stand for truth and justice.