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May 30, 2019Mostly about the covenant, the love of God
The prophets have a unique ability to remind us of just how in need are God´s people, originally our Jewish elder brothers and sisters and now all of us too, of being faithful to our deep covenant relationship with God.
God loves us. Our relationship with God is a sacred covenant of love. The prophets, God´s messengers of love, remind us of Who God is and what this covenant is. They also try to catch our attention when we stray from that covenant of love with God and invite us to return to it.
In the Old Testament, Catholics celebrate four major prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezequiel and Daniel. We call them major because our good Lord kept inspiring them with more and more messages, so their writings are more extensive, a major piece of work. The 12 minor prophets, also God´s messengers of love and the topic of our next column, end up with less quantity of material but never lesser quality.
The prophets, God´s chosen communicators who speak in his name, receive their messages from God in various ways. The great Dominican doctor of the Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas, mentions four ways or paths: the intellectual path; the path of the imagination; the path of infused vision; the path of a natural vision. God communicated with the prophets in many and varied ways and he continues to do so with us today.
This gift of prophecy, according to Aquinas, is not a permanent one. One could be chosen to communicate God´s word today and then never again be chosen to speak in God´s name. The only eternally chosen communicator of God is Jesus Christ his son, the greatest prophet.
A prophet is not necessarily a man or a Jew. Scripture records the stories of various female prophets; Esther, Sarah, Miriam and a few others. In biblical times, there also were schools for prophets located around the temple and they practiced various forms of prayer and mysticism. Not all those who attended these schools ended up writing biblical texts.
The Old Testament also gives us an example of a non-Jewish prophet. Balaam was not Jewish, and some could even argue that his donkey also was very prophetic, see Numbers 22, 22-40. Sadly, we also can find, both then and now, an assortment of false prophets.
The topics covered by the prophets are varied, but they have the love of God and the faithful keeping of the covenant as the core message. They usually begin by reminding all who can hear their voice that we are called to love our Lord God, who is one. Monotheism is essential; there is only one sovereign, holy and loving God with whom we have a unique covenant relationship and breaking this covenant can bring dire consequences.
Breaking the relationship with God is like cutting oneself off from life support or even worse!
The prophets also speak of the messianic hope, the triumph of God´s love over slavery and sin. The messiah will, and did, establish a new and permanent covenant. The messiah is a sign of hope and will come to us through the Davidic lineage. Isaiah speaks a lot of the coming messiah, the chosen one of the Lord. I invite you to sit down and hear the voice of this prophet, reading chapters 49 through 53.
Another topic covered by the prophets is the moral and social teachings that are tied to the covenant of love with God. If we truly believe in a God of love we must express our lives of faith through the way we treat one another with love, we need to take care of each other.
All these truths, the prophets remind us, also will be expressed in the various ways we worship our loving God. There are more details, but I´ll leave that for the next column.
