Prophetic

I had a conversation with a co-worker today about the cultural situations into which prophecy is spoken. I often think of it being shouted to evil, arrogant folk who must repent or be destroyed. While that certainly happened from time to time in the First Testament, there is an equal opposite. Isaiah says,
Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,

that she has received from the LORD’s hand
double for all her sins. (TNIV)

That set me to thinking about physics. Or, more specifically, the fact that I've seen a picture of a sine wave before.


What if, simplistically, the red line above the middle dotted line shows the portions of culture that are arrogant and judgmental? And the red line below shows those who feel guilty all the time and show it on the outside? Maybe these are the ones Jesus called poor in spirit.

What if the prophet is always calling people to that dotted line? I would call people around this axis self-reflective, humble, and pliable. I like to think of myself as those three things, so maybe I'm poisoning the well by creating this mythical culture in my own projected image. But bear with me.

We see in Israel's history the times when they were pretty self-confident, and God needed to bring them down a notch. Then they were way too down on themselves, and he had to say what I quoted above. But if they hadn't gotten too arrogant, they wouldn't have needed to be brought down to begin with.

A healthy self-concept where God is God, and we are his servants/stewards/image, is a good place to start. The role of prophet in a culture that lives this way would end up being more priestly; indeed, the writer to the Hebrews says Jesus's followers are a kingdom of priests. But in the meantime, prophets will always be necessary to help people tread the middle line of balance.

While I like to see myself treading this middle axis, the truth is every person and community balances around an infinite number of axes. We are not capable of keeping track of all the axes. Therefore, we humans are more susceptible to modeling ourselves after heros (or anti-heros) in stories. We can look to how YHWH and Jesus and the prophets behaved in their movements of the big story, and perhaps that will help us to learn to truly live.

Thanks to Omegatron and Wikipedia for the sine wave.