The Lonely Prophet
Ezekiel 2:1-8, Mark 6:1-13
July 8, 2012
Prophet: A divinely inspired person; a divinely inspired interpreter, revealer, or teacher of the will or thought of God or a god; a person who speaks, or is regarded as speaking, for or in the name of God or a god. (OED)
When we encounter Ezekiel in our passage for today, he is accepting the call to prophecy. God comes to him in a thundering, crowd of winged creatures, whose heads have four faces—that of a man on one side, an eagle, a lion and an ox on the other sides. At the ends of their “straight legs” are hooves. Their wings make the sound of “many waters” and they are accompanied by moving wheels, plastered with eyes. They come with clouds, wind, and fire. Ezekiel calls this “visions of god.” Ezekiel falls upon his face at this vision, at which point he hears: “Son of man, stand upon your feet, and I will speak with you” (Ezekiel 2:1).
And this is where the voice of God tells Ezekiel to go to the nation of Israel and describe to it its sins of idolatry and wantonness:
“Son of man, I send you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels, who have rebelled against me; they and their fathers have transgressed against me to this very day. The people also are impudent and stubborn: I send you to them; and you shall say to them: ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ And whether they hear or refuse to hear they will know that there has been a prophet among them. And you, son of man, be not afraid of them, nor be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns are with you and you sit upon scorpions…” (Ezekiel 2:3 – 6).
How terrifying to be summoned in such a way. And what a difficult job to take on—that of revealing the thoughts of God, an angry God. Ezekiel already had a job when God spoke to him. He was a priest and a keeper of history. Biblical scholars praise his book for its literary eloquence and intelligent weaving of folk narrative genres with political and cultural history (see Von Rad 1965). I imagine him rather settled in his profession, respected among colleagues and friends. But he answered God’s call to become the one who speaks God’s thoughts, who tells people what they don’t want to hear: how far from the path they’ve strayed.
Ezekiel agrees to be an outsider, foregoing the pleasures and privileges that go along with fitting in.
I can’t help but think about southern vernacular artists when I read the description of Ezekiel’s vision. Many of these poor, mostly rural people also answer a call to prophecy. They tell of their own visions and visitations, directing them to create art. Many are inspired by the most prophetic books of the Bible—Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelations. They use media available to people of slender means—magic marker on poster board, shop paint on plywood—to make art that speaks a truth they’re driven to tell. North Alabama painter Myrtice West has a whole Ezekiel series—paintings depicting Ezekiel’s visions of winged creatures and God’s throne. This work, along with her Revelations Series—feverishly rendered at all hours of the day–helped her cope with the murder of her daughter and brutal abuse of her grandchildren. God commanded Ezekiel to eat a scroll containing the words he was to speak to Israel. For prophetic voices like Myrtice West, paint is the medium. Evangelizing in paint—talking back visually to a world full of injustice and evil. These vernacular artists are members of disposable populations mostly—the uneducated, the mentally ill, day laborers, field hands, rural, unsophisticated and unstylish fundamentalist Christians.
Many of these artists are called “outsider artists”—they are outside the art world mainstream, and they are often outside the economic and social mainstream as well. The people who most appreciate their art are scholars and art collectors who find their life stories compelling and marketable, though not necessarily their prophetic messages.
Prophecy is hard, lonely work. In today’s gospel lesson we find Jesus in the loneliest place of all—his own hometown.
Mark is the most economical of the gospel writers. The events in Jesus’s teaching life are presented in quick succession here, and the tension around them mounts at an alarming pace. In the first five chapters of Mark that lead up to our lesson for today, we find Jesus delivering one healing after another, constantly on the go, pressed by crowds, and attracting the critical attention of the Pharisees. Here, Jesus is baptized, he takes up his disciples, and it isn’t long before he is exorcising unclean spirits. He heals a leper, raises a cripple. He takes tax collectors and sinners into his fold. He stops a twelve-year hemorrhage and brings a rabbi’s daughter back from the dead.
The crowds grow. They close in on him so much he has to get in a boat and float away from shore a bit in order to teach without being crushed. All the while, the Pharisees keep pestering him, trying to pin legal and moral transgressions on him. It feels chaotic. It feels scary. Jesus has so much to accomplish, yet people keep trying to derail and undermine him.
And here—in Mark— is where I sense Jesus’s humanity most poignantly: in his exasperation.
His disciples ask for the parable of the sower to be explained: “Do you not understand this parable?” Jesus asks, incredulous (Mark 4:13). They’re his right-hand men and they need an explanation? How are they going to be able to go forth without him?
He commands the unclean spirits to stop calling him the “Son of God” and routinely orders people to keep mum on his miracle work. But they keep talking, spreading the word about his healing power.
And finally, we reach our lesson for today, wherein Jesus seems exceptionally weary and disappointed. Here he is in his “own country,” encountering skepticism and derision from the people who’ve known him since childhood.
“A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house,” Jesus says (Mark 6:4).
I find it interesting that Jesus calls himself a prophet in this passage. A prophet, something most Christians never call Jesus. I spent a year and a half as a university lecturer in Morocco, where the majority of the population is Sunni Muslim. I answered questions about Christianity on a regular basis. People there liked to point out that Muslims and Christians are both “people of the book”—“ness al-ketab” in Moroccan Arabic. It was one of those ways of establishing common ground with a foreigner—a conversation starter. It didn’t really have to go anywhere. We could easily move on to talking about the weather, family, train schedules. They would assure me that they—Muslims—recognized Jesus as a prophet. And that Mary—mother of Jesus– is respected and revered; indeed, Miriam is a popular Arab name. But you don’t recognize Mohammed, was usually in the next breath. This was often where the conversation ended. I did and do recognize Mohammed. But it was confusing to most people why—given this recognition—I wasn’t going to convert to Islam. The most challenging concept to engage was the Trinity, of course. “We only believe in one god,” my friend Karima told me. “But you have three—the big one and then the two little ones—Jesus and the Holy Spirit.”
I didn’t find myself inclined to let that one pass, but even as I protested, I found myself losing my thread. The Trinity is, as Chinua Achebe’s character in Things Fall Apart puts it, a “mad logic” to me. I’ve never hinged my faith on it. It is one of the reasons I left the Episcopal church—so much emphasis on the Trinity—a concept that seems unnecessarily elusive and frankly not that central to the Good News.
But here we have Jesus, basically calling himself a prophet: the same thing people in North Africa say about him. I realized after reading this passage again, and after months of conversations with Muslims about Christianity, that I like Jesus-the-prophet. He makes more sense this way and is certainly easier to explain to people of other faiths from this perspective.
To me, it is his humanity that makes him so compelling—that he got his feelings hurt in his own hometown. That he was mad enough to suggest his apostles do something kind of spiteful and definitely, pointedly insulting. “…if any place will not receive you and they refuse to hear you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet for a testimony against them” (Mark 6:11).
When I think of Jesus, I always think of someone terribly misunderstood in his own time and how frustrating it must have been to be him. I imagine him as kind of impatient and maybe difficult to get along with.
I love Jesus—but it isn’t the possibility of his divinity that I love. It is his humanity and his prophetic life—lonely, disappointed, gritty, determined, brave, sad, and scared. This I can identify with. But Jesus is a mystery, too. There is no denying the holy tension he lives into.
To enter the scriptures as I imagine many self-taught southern artists do—with little to lose—is to take on some of this holiness burden. To get sanctified—and to get lonely—with Jesus.
The other day, Serena—our 3.5 year old—had her great-grandmother’s rosary around her neck. “Is this God?” she asked, holding up the crucifix for me to see. “It’s Jesus,” I said. “Is it a woman?” she asked. “Jesus was a man,” I said. She examined the little effigy on the cross more closely. “I think it’s a woman,” she said. Later in the day, she approached Daniel, her two-year-old brother, and thrust the crucifix at him. “Look here,” she said. “This is God.” This time I didn’t correct her.
Oxford English Dictionary.
Von Rad, Gerhard. 1965. Old Testament Theology, Vol. II. San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha. 1973. Eds. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York: Oxford University Press.