Readings: Jeremiah 6:11-16, 24; Matthew 14:1-12
Does any child think:
I’d like to be like John the Baptist
when I grow up?
Does anyone think:
I’d like to live in the desert and eat bugs
and then, after achieving a measure of notoriety,
subordinate my entire existence
to that of my hitherto unknown cousin?
Does anyone think:
I’d like ultimately to end up being killed,
because a pretty girl whose mother I had offended
dances a deadly dance of seduction
and gets a powerful but foolish man
to grant her one wish, which is my head on a platter?
Not exactly every child’s dream.
I’d like to be like John the Baptist
when I grow up?
Does anyone think:
I’d like to live in the desert and eat bugs
and then, after achieving a measure of notoriety,
subordinate my entire existence
to that of my hitherto unknown cousin?
Does anyone think:
I’d like ultimately to end up being killed,
because a pretty girl whose mother I had offended
dances a deadly dance of seduction
and gets a powerful but foolish man
to grant her one wish, which is my head on a platter?
Not exactly every child’s dream.
And yet, at our baptism,
each of us was anointed
priest, king, and also prophet.
For those of us baptized as infants,
we, like Jeremiah, did not get much say
in our prophetic vocation:
we were more or less called
from our mothers’ wombs.
Yet prophets we are.
Some of us, but probably not many of us,
end up being the dramatic sort of prophet
that John the Baptist and Jeremiah were—
those who are provocative and persecuted
and perhaps even killed.
But most of us who seek to live the prophetic vocation
end up being what I would call “ordinary prophets”:
those whose ears have been opened sacramentally
to hear God’s words
and whose tongues have been
loosed to speak them.
We ordinary prophets are called
to bear witness to glad tidings
by living our lives as if the Gospel is true
and by giving to any who ask
an account of the hope that is in us.
And some of us, the lucky ones,
get paid for doing this;
we get to be professors of theology,
though I would not suggest
listing “ordinary prophet” on your CV
among your academic positions held,
even if you teach at a Catholic university.
get paid for doing this;
we get to be professors of theology,
though I would not suggest
listing “ordinary prophet” on your CV
among your academic positions held,
even if you teach at a Catholic university.
We academic ordinary prophets
generally don’t face any external persecution
apart from the tenure process
(again, if we’re lucky).
We’re more likely to face a kind of
internal persecution of self-doubt,
of endlessly comparing our achievements
to those of others,
of playing games of power,
of thinking of our work not as the pursuit of wisdom
but as a kind of joyless “knowledge production.”
We academic ordinary prophets often discover
that our most severe persecution comes from ourselves.
We dance our own dance of deadly seduction;
we put our own head on the platter.
And the remedy for this internal self-persecution
is the same as that for external persecution:
the fearlessness that flows
from the truth of the Gospel.
The remedy is to live, as John the Baptist lived,
in order to bear witness to Jesus,
to let ourselves decrease
so that he might increase,
to always bear in mind
that there is a divine teacher
whose sandals we are not worthy to untie
but who has called us nonetheless
to speak his word.
We pray that this teacher
would teach us to be prophets
and that God, in his mercy,
would have mercy on us all.
