Who Presumes to Speak in my Name
THE FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY
Deuteronomy 18:15-20 • 1 Corinthians 8:1-13 • Mark 1:21-28 • Psalm 111
In 2008, a film called Religulous mocked and rebuked religious faith. The last few minutes of the film splice together footage of militias and terrorist attacks, while a voice informs us how much “lunacy and destruction” religious faith has “spawned and justified.” The people who spawn all this destruction claim to act on God’s orders. But the voice in the film says there are no gods, and that religious leaders simply fill that “void” with “their own corruptions and limitations and agendas.”
Today’s first reading might sound especially disturbing to someone aware of just how dangerous people who claim to speak for God can be. The Lord announces his plan to communicate with people not directly, but through a prophet. The Lord says, “I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to [the people] everything that I command.” Anyone who doesn’t heed what the prophet speaks in the Lord’s name is directly accountable to the Lord.
To recap: the Lord speaks to the prophet, the prophet speaks to the people, and the people obey the prophet as if he’s the Lord himself.
Anyone with a capacity for critical thinking can see problems with this plan. What’s to stop someone from claiming to speak in the Lord’s name and taking advantage of people’s obedience? Anyone manipulative, or well-intentioned but delusional, could claim to be a prophet.
The authors of Deuteronomy anticipated this objection. In today’s reading, the Lord says, “any prophet who . . . presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak—that prophet shall die.” Okay . . . but when? How? Will false prophets really just drop dead?
In case that doesn’t happen, the passage from Deuteronomy continues beyond what we read aloud this morning. “You may say to yourself,” says the Lord, “‘How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?’” When I read this passage in my Bible, I said, “Lord, I was wondering that very thing!” The passage then offers a simple test to determine whether a prophet speaks for the Lord: If a prophet predicts something, and that thing doesn’t happen, they were a false prophet (Deut 18:22).
I appreciate that the authors of Deuteronomy are trying, but I see problems with accurate predictions test. Suppose a self-proclaimed prophet predicts the world will end ten years from now. Do we have to wait ten years before we find out whether they spoke for the Lord or not? Do we heed all their words in the meantime, just in case?
And here’s another problem: Can’t anyone make a lucky guess? Last Sunday night, I predicted to some friends that Fayetteville Public Schools would be closed all day Monday, and that the university would delay its opening until noon. When almost exactly that happened, I texted those friends in all caps: “DID I CALL IT OR WHAT??” But my seeming powers of weather and school closure prediction don’t mean anyone should listen to me about God.
The book of Deuteronomy actually acknowledges that some so-called prophets and people who “divine by dreams” might predict omens and portents that do appear. In this case, accurate predictions do not a prophet make. If these diviners then encourage people to follow other gods, they shouldn’t be trusted after all (Deut 13:1-3). But can’t false prophets easily pass this test? Instead of giving themselves away by suggesting people follow other gods, they can simply claim to speak in the name of the one and only one God.
One last problem with the criterion of accurate prediction is that the biblical prophet Jonah couldn’t be considered a real prophet. He prophesied that the Lord would overthrow the great city of Nineveh in forty days (Jonah 3:4). But then the Ninevites fasted, and put on sackcloth, and cried out to God, and placed their faith and hope in a God who could change his mind. And God did change his mind. At the end of the forty days, God didn’t destroy Nineveh after all, and Jonah looked like a fool. Does that mean Jonah wasn’t really a prophet?
I haven’t even gotten to what’s most troubling about the claims about prophets in today’s reading. What concerns me most is that while trying to clarify who does and doesn’t speak for God, and what a prophet does or doesn’t do, the authors of the book of Deuteronomy place their own angenda on the lips of the prophet Moses, who had died 800 years prior.
Our reading today, from chapter 18 of Deuteronomy, begins with the words, “Moses said,” or “Moses summoned all Israel and said to them.” But the “Moses said” part is actually from way back in chapter 5 (5:1). And at the end of today’s reading, so-called “Moses” isn’t done talking—not by a long shot. The way the book of Deuteronomy depicts it, Moses delivered 24 straight chapters of instructions for how the Israelites were supposed to live in the Promised Land. But these chapters are really a combination of teachings and laws from later in Israel’s history.
Some of these instructions promote timeless principles of social justice. For example, if you forget a sheaf in the field at harvest time, you shouldn’t go back for it, but leave it there for orphans, widows, and foreigners (Deut 24:19-21). But other instructions haven’t aged so well. For example, people are told to limit public floggings to forty lashes (Deut 25:2-3), and to stone women who weren’t virgins on their wedding day (Deut 22:20-21).
(The only thing more challenging than the Scripture we do read in Church is the Scripture we don’t.)
The authors of Deuteronomy try to constrain the role of prophet to promoting their own well-meaning agenda of legislating the ways of life they believed would help people live peaceably with each other and in a lasting relationship with God. For these authors, the test of a prophet was how well they predicted the future and conveyed the Lord’s commands.
But in earlier biblical history, prophets critiqued the present and tried to change God’s mind on the people’s behalf. These prophets also spoke in poetry, not legalese.
The version of Moses we meet in Deuteronomy does remind us of this earlier prophetic role, in the story of how Moses took on this prophetic role. In the fuller telling of this episode in the book of Exodus, the people see the Lord’s presence in thunder and lightning, and hear a sound like a trumpet. They tremble, and stand at a distance from the smoking Mt. Sinai. They fear that if the Lord speaks directly to them, they’ll die, so they beg Moses to do it for them. Moses honors their request, but in Exodus, he also encourages them to be less afraid of God. Still, the people keep their distance, while Moses alone, as we read in Exodus, “drew near to the thick darkness where God was” (Exo 20:18-21).
Delegating to “prophets” the work of speaking to God, and placing too much faith in these individuals, is fraught with danger. But when more of us are bold enough to ask critical questions, and brave enough to encounter God in the thick darkness ourselves, we guard against some of these dangers. We also might heed prophet-like insights from religion’s fiercest but sometimes perceptive critics.
The narrator of Religulous claims that religion “mak[es] a virtue out of not thinking.” We can take this critique to heart, but we’ll also have chances to defy that prediction.
© 2024 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas