Day 13: Prophecy
If we can agree on the general idea that hope involves waiting for something or expecting something with varying degrees of certainty or possibility, then how does hope find its direction? How do we decide what to wait for, what to expect? How do our little hearts choose what to desire?
On the first Sunday of Advent, a friend sent me a text reminding me that hope – early, Biblical hope – was somehow connected to prophecy. I tend to think of prophecy as some sort of prediction of the future. And I tend to think of Old Testament prophets as folks who kind of went around spreading dread and doom about all the terrible things that would happen if folks didn’t change their ways.
It seems like prophets are generally thought to have received some sort of divine inspiration behind their messages and hang their authority on that. Prophets carry messages from God to the world around them. (Now that I think about it, wasn’t that the angels’ job, too: to bring messages from God? I digress.)
Prophets are often reluctant to accept the position. Moses offered a lot of counter-arguments at the burning bush recruitment event. Poor old Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. Turns out he didn’t really have a choice.
I don’t imagine people would be happy to see a prophet coming down the road. They aren’t spouting off winning lottery numbers or bringing the Publisher’s Clearing House prize patrol to your door. They mostly just tell us that God’s judgment is coming and it ain’t pretty. Some prophets have very elaborate visions of how this judgement looks. If they were movies, I wouldn’t be able to watch them for all the violence.
But also, I think the OT prophets came up with this idea of a messiah, a person who would set the world right, would ease the pain, and would save us from others … and from ourselves. Lord knows I need saving from myself.
And the prophets also have a lot to say about restoration in general, and that could be really beautiful. You know, if we get our act together and turn back to God. It seems like of like the prophets set up two options for our future: reward or punishment.
Maybe those messages – words about options for our future, particularly words attributed to the divine – are enough to drive a hope, to give us something to expect or desire.
Perhaps someone telling us what is going to happen in the future is one thing that informs our hope. Maybe their words plant a seed about a possibility for the future, and we hope toward the plant that seed will become.