Responding to the Prophets

Reflections on prophets, response, and surrender based on today's readings: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062425-Mass.cfm

Today’s solemnity is an invitation to meditate upon not only the life and mission of St. John the Baptist, but how St. John the Baptist is the most perfect representation of what it means to be a prophet. There are still prophets in our day, and reflecting upon what it truly means to be a prophet teaches us how we ought to respond to prophets.

The reading from Isaiah offers us a view into the interior life of the prophet. It shows that even though the prophet is called from before birth to their very specific mission and given great gifts to help them perform their mission, there still exists an internal tension.

This tension is on clear display in all the major prophets (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Isaiah). It is the tension of having been graced with a clear vision of the Lord and His will and trying to communicate this vision to a people insistent upon viewing the world from their own perspective and accomplishing their own will.

In today’s reading, Isaiah gives expression and insight into this tension: “Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, yet my reward is with the LORD, my recompense is with my God.”

He is revealing that it is not only necessary that a prophet must feel this tension but that it is good the prophet feels the tension. Because all the prophet desires is the clear vision of the Lord, the resistance to the prophet is a means by which the Lord further purifies their desire and frees them from seeking rewards besides the Lord.

In other words, the Lord is even using the rejection of the prophets to serve Divine Providence. The rejection of the prophets is not a “wrinkle” in His plan, but an essential part of His plan. It is, in many ways, their rejection that emphasizes their message.

Though the prophet was chosen before birth for a very specific mission, a mission of communicating the Will of the Lord to His People, the prophet accepts this mission by living in a perpetual state of surrender and abandonment to Divine Providence. It is precisely when others do not understand the message that the prophet begins to truly understand his mission.

All of this is not only on the clearest display with St. John the Baptist, but we are also given the most explicit way in which we can properly respond to the prophets (and the one of whom they prophesy!). Responding well to the prophets is something the people are notoriously bad at in Scripture.

We see St. John was chosen before birth and we see that there is a peculiarity in that his parents are aware of his prophetic mission. This detail is in part what makes John the perfect prophet: he was taught how to make way for the one who is coming, who is much greater than him, by witnessing his parents make way for him who would be much greater than them.

There is a multi-generational humility at display that leads to an eternally significant mission. The family was truly chosen to present the Will of the Lord to the people and this truly required their own surrender in order to understand and communicate His Will, but their story highlights the importance of humility in this process.

The people had historically been closed to the prophets both because they were too attached to their worldly ways and also because they rejected the authority with which the prophet speaks. Who is this guy to tell us what to do?

Yet, the legacy of humility from St. John, his proximity to the coming of Christ, and the content of his preaching all combine to show how this is a total misunderstanding of the prophet. It is the worldly thinking that interprets the prophet in such a way, but a look towards the divine shows us that the prophet does not think themselves praiseworthy at all but is lost in a constant praise of the Lord and that is precisely what makes them a prophet.

To say it another way, the prophet is actually not the one who thinks he can tell others what to do but the one who is telling others that they don’t have this authority, even over themselves. He is reminding them that we are all under the authority of God and that this is a blessed thing because our own illusions of authority bring about our misery while submitting to the authority of God is the path to eternal happiness.

St. John brings such light to this path to eternal happiness because he preaches in simple but powerful terms of what the path is. It is a life-long commitment to repentance and preparation for the coming of the Lord.

The Lord is always present but we are never prepared unless we are properly repentant. The Lord has had a plan for all of us since before we were born, but few come to understand it because they are so preoccupied with their own plans.

St. John shows that one must make a very radical reorientation of their lives if they are to understand the very radical way in which the Lord wants to bless us. And he shows us that this is not a one-time reorientation, but we must be eternally reorienting ourselves to the eternal.

May the Lord help shine his light upon us through all the prophets, but especially through St. John the Baptist, and may this light encourage us to commit to life of perpetual repentance and surrender to the Lord. May we relinquish our distorted desire for control and allow the Lord to guide us to Him and to all happiness.