To be prophetic First Part

In some midweek prayer services, very well attended mostly by students, I have been impressed by the prophetic insights of our young people. From their meditations, songs and skits, they want to prevent the Church from becoming ingrown and morbid, cynical and disillusioned, in the face of the world's needs.

In short, they want the Church to be prophetic. In their concern that our faith become relevant to practically every dimension of human life, they refer to the prophet Jeremiah; for light can break in for our enlightenment from this prophet of the sixth century BC.

But what basically is a prophet? At the most simplistic, we think of a prophet as one who gazes into a crystal ball, a soothsayer much like Nostradamus of the ancient world who predictions continue to be researched. Or much like Jean Dixon who was supposed to have foreseen that assassination of the late US President, John F. Kennedy. (And by the way, there are local “Jean Dixons” in the Philippines too.)

But basically, a prophet is not that. A prophet, in the style of the classical prophets of the Old Testament, is one who speaks for God with distinctive relevance to the prevailing conditions. He is sensitive to the hopes of his people, but especially to their fears and heartaches, to the crises and the issues that are a matter of life and death to them. So the prophetic calling is an agonizing task; it is a precarious enterprise. To be a prophet is to put one's life on the line.

So the question before us is this: Wherein lies the agony of the prophetic calling?

First of all, the prophetic calling is “agonizing” because the prophet is subject to the historical realities of his own time.

In the very first verses of the book of Jeremiah, one reads a kind of boring and uninteresting catalogue of kings who ruled during the career of the prophet. Boring, yes, but it is essential because it provides us with the setting of Jeremiah's agonizing reflections which are now called in the dictionary “jeremiads” or sad meditations.

One cannot understand the stormy career of Jose Rizal apart from the historical setting of a national tragedy when we were a colony of Spain . One cannot understand how it is that the American people celebrate a Martin Luther King Day apart from the tumultuous civil rights struggles in the USA some decades ago. And one would understand the writings of a Dietich Bonhoffer of Germany only if the reader knows that they were written during the heyday of Hitler's despotic rule which sent six million Jews to die in the incinerators. TO BE CONTINUED*

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