Texts: Amos 7:7-15; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29
In our gospel story last week Jesus upset his hometown folk. Who did he think he was coming back here with all his airs and graces and clever talk. He might have forgotten he’s just a carpenter’s son, but we haven’t. Cheeky young upstart! And, said Mark, they took offence at him. And Jesus himself repeated the proverb, a prophet is without honour in his hometown.
This week we need to revise that outwards, so to speak. Or, perhaps, shorten it. Prophets are without honour, full-stop. It’s true that we don’t always take kindly to one of our own telling us a few home truths; but it’s equally true that we don’t much care for the visitor from overseas offering advice either. And when that person claims to be a prophet, claims to have some special insight from God, then the sooner he or she catches a plane back home the better as far as we are concerned. If someone is a prophet, we don’t like him or her, whether native-born or foreign.
But hang on a minute, we don’t have prophets these days, do we? Apart from the odd raver who thinks he is God’s spokesman. Well, as always much depends on our definition of a prophet. If by the term we mean someone who has been called specifically by God to deliver a message from God, then perhaps we don’t have any today – at least, not inside the Church. But if we mean that a prophet is someone who speaks out the truth however unwelcome it may be, then we have a few in this country from time to time.
And we can recognise them by the reaction they provoke. One recent example in my view is the cartoonist in the ODT. Recently he drew two young Maori babies, and one of them is saying to the other, “If we can survive childhood, the whanau will protect us when we’re grown up.” Hard-hitting stuff – and like good cartoons, not intended to be side-splitting funny – but intended to make a very strong and important point.
Why, as a society, are we intent on protecting adult offenders instead of child victims? And before we rush to say, but this is only one case, or this is the Maori community, not we Pakehas, let me make the point that it is Pakeha law that is protecting the Maori offenders in this case – and, in fact, in many other cases regardless of the ethnic identity of the offenders. What is at stake here is the so-called right to remain silent – not just in those cases where we might incriminate ourselves – but in any case. As a general rule, none of us are obliged to tell the Police or the Courts what we know about any offence that may have been committed.
Does that make sense? Well, it does if we believe that the individual is more important than the community, is more important than truth or justice or even public safety. If we believe that, then we should stop complaining about the Kahui whanau, or about any other group refusing to supply information to the Police. And we should side with the predictable response in a letter to the editor of the ODT criticising Tremain’s cartoon. If the truth is likely to offend, then suppress it. We may not decapitate our prophets these days, but we would like to have them banned from publication.
It’s not only cartoonists who threaten us with unpalatable truths. The medical profession has a disconcerting habit of doing so as well. A year or two ago an expert in gynaecology made some comment about the fertility of the human egg. He said a woman’s fertility begins to decline around the age of 27-28. I have no idea whether that is a fact or not; but he wasn’t criticised for being wrong. He was attacked by an advocate for women’s health for being a throwback to the past when men thought they had the right to dictate to women about the exercise of their reproductive functions!
And something briefly flared up this week about the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy. We must be careful not to push the anti-alcohol-in-pregnancy message too hard in case we make those women who do drink during pregnancy feel guilty.
And talking of alcohol, in this same week we were invited to feel sorry for a young man who threw one punch, which led to the death of his victim, a conviction for manslaughter, and a prison sentence of two and a half years. What we are not supposed to do is ask why a seventeen year-old was drinking at 5.30 in the morning. Perhaps he thought that if it was okay for a thirty-three year-old father of three and international role model to be drinking at that sort of hour, then it was okay for him. Perhaps it would have been if he had hit the guy with a handbag instead of his fist. And what we are definitely not supposed to do is draw any links between our general attitude to liquor as a society and this individual case.
Liquor, like guns, does not kill. Only drunks kill, and that’s their fault, not ours.
And there we have the basic problem that always faces our prophets. Their task is to make such links. They are charged with looking at the big picture, to look at our society as a whole and warn us if we are going in the wrong direction. In particular, they should remind us of the limits within which we have been created to live, and to warn us of the consequences of breaking those limits.
The debate about climate-change is a fascinating example of all this. Again, I must confess my lack of expertise to know who is right and who is wrong on the basic scientific data. But doesn’t commonsense tell us that there ARE limits? We may not have reached them yet, but reach them we will one day, unless we change our ways. Don’t we know in our hearts, that we cannot go on dumping toxic things in our oceans and in our atmosphere without steadily increasing unhealthy consequences? Perhaps today the debate is toning down, becoming less heated, more polite and considerate; but it is not so long ago that people who warned of climate-change were ridiculed as members of the lunatic fringe.
The debate about obesity is showing all the signs of following a similar path. Our favoured solution is to make stronger beds and wider aeroplane seats, rather than seek to change the diets of our children.
Such is the way of the world – such is our human nature. When Amos was sent to warn the people of Israel of the path they were on, they turned on him. They didn’t debate with him the rights and wrongs of his vision; they told him to get back to where he had come from: they accused him of raising a conspiracy against the king. In modern terms, they accused him of being unpatriotic – or worse.
In our gospel reading today St Mark gives us a fascinating glimpse of life in the fast lane as it was in Jesus’ time; and I wonder if it is very different today. Life in the dance scene – Salome wriggling her stuff – Herod pie-eyed with alcohol rather than party pills, perhaps, but the effect is the same. And the outcome is oh, so predictable. Today the victim would be decapitated in a car crash, but the cause would be the same. Excessive consumption. Lack of self-control – lack of human dignity – lack of meaning or purpose in life. Lack of self –respect – lack of respect for others. Above all, lack of a willingness to accept that limits are built into the way things are and are meant to be.
And how they are meant to be is spelt out for us in one of the most glorious passages in the whole of Scripture. No paraphrase of mine can do justice to this passage; you will have to read it for yourselves. We used to be told that we should inwardly digest the words of Scripture – that they were food for the soul. But this one is drink for the soul. This is a passage to be sipped over a long period of time. It’s the best cure for depression in the whole Bible.
So we have two ways of life to choose from – one that leads to eternal life and one that leads to death. The prophets are the ones who point in the right direction – who encourage us to choose wisely. They are the ones who tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear. We should thank God for them
And listen to them
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