by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace
The first lesson today is about a prophet, Jeremiah, and about prophecy, and the Gospel lesson is also about Jesus as a prophet and his prophetic work. We might think these lessons don’t apply to us very much because who of us thinks of ourselves as a prophet? I don’t think many of us do. We think prophets are other people — “I wouldn’t be a prophet” — and yet we should recall our baptism.
When you were baptized, when each of us was baptized, we were anointed with holy chrism, and the priest said, “God anoints you with the chrism of salvation. As Jesus was anointed priest, prophet and king, so you must live always as a member of his body — priest, prophet and king — ruler.” We are called to be prophets. We are anointed as prophets. Yet that still seems strange to most of us, I believe, because we really do think of prophets as people who are other than ourselves.
It’s important this morning to discover a little bit about what it means to be a prophet. First of all, a prophet is not someone who predicts the future. I think that’s sometimes why we are unable to think of ourselves as prophets because we think we would have to be able to predict the future. But that’s not what prophecy is. A prophet is someone who, as in the book of the prophet Isaiah, he speaks about himself: “God has taught me, so I speak as God’s disciple and I know how to sustain the weary. Morning after morning, God wakes me up to hear, to listen like a disciple, someone learning God’s ways.”…
I remember at our Merton/Maritain Conference that Dan Berrigan was speaking. Someone spoke up and said, “YOU are a prophet.” Dan answered, ” If you are not a prophet, you are a loss.” Oh, yeah!