Homily, 9-4-23; Monday of the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time:
Jesus is priest, prophet, and king. In today’s gospel passage we hear allusions to his prophetic role. First, He is the subject of Isaiah’s prophesy. He is the one anointed by the Holy Spirit to bring glad tidings to the poor, liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed. And then, He also associates his own activity to that of the prophet Elijah who miraculously aided the widow of Zarephath during the famine, and to Elisha who miraculously cured Naaman the Syrian of leprosy.
The prophets were persecuted, especially by their own people, and so would be Jesus. The people want miracles, but they don’t want to listen to the instruction given to them by God through the prophet. They do not have faith in the prophet’s words because he is one of them. They do not regard him as anyone special. If he will not work miracles for them, they despise the prophet’s words and want to put him to death.
Jesus is priest, prophet, and king, and through our baptisms we share in the priestly, prophetic, and kingly mission of the Church. And so we are reminded that we are all called to be prophets, not in the sense of predicting the future, but in that we are called to proclaim the truth even when people do not want to hear it. And of course this will lead to persecution, often by those closest to us.
How many of our friends and family members will reject any instruction or Church teaching that we try to pass on to them, but will listen to and follow some unknown person they found on the internet? Are we willing to listen to our spouse or a friend if they claim to have been given some instruction by God during prayer, or do we write it off as some crazy nonsense?
We must be humble when speaking the truth. We must be prophets without acting like prophets, not to avoid persecution, but so that our message can be separated from the one presenting it, so that we don’t come off as being holier than thou. And when we seek the truth for ourselves, we should not fail to look first to those around us and the resources available in Scripture and the Catechism. Seers and locutionists and miraculous events from around the world can serve a valuable role in waking us up and causing us to examine our lives and our behaviors, but they should not be the basis for our faith.