Would
That All the Lord’s People Were Prophets
August
22, 2021
In a sermon I
heard recently I heard a suggestion that we liberal, progressive Christians,
should not criticize other Christians who see the faith differently than we do.
I heard a call for us to avoid “spiritual warfare.” I write here to say I
couldn’t disagree more. Remaining silent may be pastoral. There certainly are
contexts in which pastoral silence is called for and even necessary for us to
serve people we are called to serve. I’m thinking of the situations where I
have been called upon to provide pastoral care at the end of life for people
whose view of life after death is very different from mine. That is not the
time to argue the theology of life after death. Yet pastor is only one of the
things God calls us to be. God also calls us to be prophets. In the Torah some
people complain to Moses that some other people are prophesying who weren’t
authorized to prophesy. Moses responds, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that
the Lord would put his spirit on them!” Numbers 11:29. The great eighth century
BCE Hebrew prophets, Jews all, railed against other Jews who were practicing
Judaism all wrong. Amos attacked those Jews who thought that all their God
required of them was sacrificial worship and the observation of Jewish festival
days. Speaking the words of God, he said:
I hate, I despise
your festivals,
And I take no delight in your solemn
assemblies.
Even though you
offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings
of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me
the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your
harps.
But let justice
roll down like waters,
And righteousness like an ever-flowing
stream. Amos 5:21-24.
In Jesus’ day the Pharisees were a
prominent school of Judaism, and Jesus never tired of condemning them. A Jew
himself, Jesus went to far as to call the Pharisees a “brood of vipers.”
Matthew 12:34. In that verse the Jew Jesus calls the Jewish Pharisees evil. He
certainly didn’t feel himself constrained from criticizing other Jews who he
though were practicing their faith all wrong. We aren’t Jesus of course, but
the Torah calls us all to be prophets. I am sure that Jesus does too. In our
world today there simply is no doubt that many Christians, perhaps even most
Christians, are practicing our great faith all wrong. Here are just a few
examples of how wrong they get the Christian faith.
·
Jesus preached the kingdom of God and called us
to transform ourselves and the world here and now, in this life not in some
imagined future life on some other plane of being. Since at least the fourth
century CE however most Christians have understood him, wrongly, to be about
getting our souls to heaven after we die.
·
Jesus preached nonviolent social revolution. In
virtually everything he did and said he turn the world of his time and place
upside down. He proclaimed God’s values of justice and peace against the world’s
ways of oppression and violence. Yet most Christians today take him as a bulwark
of the world’s status quo and turn ancient cultural values and
(mis)understandings into the word of God.
·
The Bible is quite obviously a purely human
product that, while it also contains great wisdom, is full of contradictions
and assertions that are quite simply wrong. God did not order Saul to kill
every living thing among the Amalekites the way 1 Samuel 15:1-3, says God did.
No one who proclaims God as a God of love, 1 John 4:8, can possibly believe
that God did any such thing. The Bible contradicts itself on how many animals
Noah took into the ark. Compare Genesis 6:19 with Genesis 7:2-3. Either Jesus
was on his knees in real human agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Mark 14:21-36,
or the armed band that came to arrest him fell to their knees before his divine
majesty, John 18:1-6[1].
Yet popular Christianity today has convinced itself that the Bible is the
inerrant word, or words, of God that contains no errors and no contradictions.
·
Jesus was a nonviolent revolutionary who
demanded the nonviolent overturning of essentially everything in the status quo
of his day including all of its political, economic, social, religious, and
cultural institutions and ways. Popular evangelical Christianity today,
however, has become a bastion of the status quo. Its leaders direct their
followers to vote for politicians who will change nothing for the better and to
resist transformation of the world into one of justice—except perhaps for
themselves.
The list of ways in which popular,
evangelical Christianity distorts and abuses the faith of Jesus Christ could go
on and on, but I trust I have made the point. A great deal of contemporary
Christianity is just wrong in its interpretation and practice of the faith.
Does God call us
to be silent in the face of the widespread bastardization of our great faith? Of
course not. “Would that all of the Lord’s
people were prophets.” Are we supposed to be nice and avoid all conflict in the
family of faith? No! Was Jesus nice and avoiding conflict when he overturned
the tables of the moneychangers in the temple? See Mark 11:15-17. Of course not. He was committing a prophetic
act against the temple itself. We are called not to silence but to speak the
truth. Ephesians 4:15. Yes, that verse also tells us to speak the truth in
love, but it most certainly does not call us to be silent in the presence of
evil. Christ’s directive that we love one another, John 13:34, does not mean
love one another by not speaking the truth. Did God send us Jesus Christ as one
who would not speak the truth because some people thought it wasn’t nice for
him to do so? Of course not. What use would we have of such a Christ? God knows
that we don’t need that kind of Christ. We need a Christ who speaks God’s truth
and isn’t afraid to do it despite what he knew could happen to him if he did.
That’s the Christ God sent us in Jesus.
So with all due
respect to pastors and other Christians who believe that God calls us only to
be pastoral, only to be nice, I say no. That’s not all God calls us to be. God
calls us to be prophets as well. Prophets of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a
radical Gospel of nonviolent worldly transformation from the ways of injustice
and violence that so characterize today’s world to God’s ways of peace through
the nonviolent establishment of justice. Not the due process kind of justice,
although that is important too in its own way. Justice as the undoing of
social, economic, and political systems that oppress and impoverish some so
that others may be immensely wealthy. How can we remain silent in the face of
that undeniable reality? We can’t. God calls us to be prophets. Let’s get on
with it, shall we?
[1] In
the New Revised Standard Version and other English translations of the Bible
Jesus says “I am he” when told that the mob come to arrest him was looking for
Jesus of Nazareth. The NRSV, however, has a translators’ note here that says that
the Greek original only has him say “I am.” “I am” is the sacred name of God in
Judaism. See Exodus 3:14.
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