Where Have All the Prophets Gone?

It seems to me that in recent years the church has been losing much of its connection with the prophets of ancient Israel. When I grew up they were deeply ingrained in the church's life. The old Christian Faith and Life Sunday School curriculum devoted one year out of every three to the Old Testament, with a substantial focus on the prophets. We read from the prophets during church services, and sermons often discussed their teachings. One result was that I learned to evaluate the contemporary world in the context of the prophetic call for a just society, and I learned that standing up to the powers that be when they fail to live up to that standard is an essential part of being a Christian. Amos, with his passionate call for justice and denunciation of those who had resources and power but acted unjustly, was (and is) one of my heroes.

My experience in recent years, both in my own congregation and in others that I have attended, is that the prophetic voice no longer plays the role that it once did. Even on those relatively rare occasions when the common lectionary finds room for a reading from a prophet, and when that reading is included in the service, what the prophet has to say is seldom part of the sermon. The only exception comes during advent, when we read certain portions of Isaiah because, whatever their original context and meaning, Christians have come to see them as foretelling the coming of the Messiah. Even then, there is seldom any effort to place those readings into the context of the rest of the prophet's message or even to use them to understand the message that Jesus brought.

I find this trend disturbing for at least two reasons. First, without listening to the prophets we may miss God's call to create a just and loving community in our own times. The Christianity that we hear today, and that has resonated with Americans for a long time, is too often a Christianity directed toward individuals, focused on individual salvation and individual action. The prophets remind us that God called the people of Israel not as individuals but as a community and that He called on them to live as a community of justice. Specifically, the prophets remind us that God judged Israel by how it treated the weak and the poor, not by how luxuriously its wealthier members lived. That is a message that we need to hear at a time when the gospel of wealth--of individual wealth divorced from the welfare of the community as a whole--is growing in our society.

The second reason that I find the loss of the prophets disturbing is that it impoverishes our understanding of Jesus and His ministry. Jesus expressly attached His ministry to the prophetic tradition, and that is part of how the early church understood Him. If we do not understand the prophets, we do not understand Jesus. Beyond that, the prophets supplement Jesus' own teachings. In part because of their expectation that the Kingdom of God would come to earth in the near future, and in part because the power of the Roman Empire limited their ability to affect governmental policy, Jesus and the early church did not expressly develop a full social gospel. Reading what Jesus said in light of the prophetic emphasis on the just covenant community shows, however, that they did do so implicitly. For example, many people try to reduce the impact of the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46 by arguing that it applies only to individual charity; reading the parable in the light of the prophets makes it clear that it is also a statement about the requirements for a just society.

I hope that we will return to the prophets, so that we may again hear their challenge to us as a church and as a society to do justice and to love mercy as well as to walk humbly with our God.