BILLTESKA

They did so on slightly different grounds: not that He was crazy, exactly, but that they knew Him too well. For any prophet or spiritual messenger to get our attention, he has to be exotic to some degree. A figure too familiar won’t do. He has to be an outsider, an alien, an other, if we are to hear him speak in the voice of One Who is utterly other. Why should we trust a childhood friend who comes around saying he’s on a mission from God? “Yeah, you and the Blues Brothers!” we would say.

Paul had the same problem. What he had to say came out of his mystical experiences – on the road to Damascus and the one he reported to the Corinthians in today’s Epistle. Notice how hesitant he is to tell about it. He understands the problem. At first, he pretends he is talking about someone else, and with a disclaimer. (“Whether in the body or not I do not know, God knows.”) He says he won’t brag about his visions so that people won’t think “better” of him than he deserves, but I’ll bet he was more worried that they would think he was a kook!

Then there is Ezekiel: “A spirit entered into me and set me on my feet; and I heard him speaking to me.” Well, if you said that nowadays, you would be given a nice, stiff shot of thorazine… or, you might be elected president. But whatever the reaction, the prophet has to speak, heedless of briers and thorns and scorpions, fearless and contemptuous of social approval. Just like a lunatic. This is the problem God set for Himself by setting us free. How is God supposed to communicate with us, without compelling us to listen, without undoing His own creation? “He could do no deed of power there…” says Mark. Almighty God in the flesh was powerless in Nazareth.

Well, not quite: “He laid hands on a few sick people and cured them.” But that kind of thing was not all that extraordinary. The really extraordinary things, the deeds of power like calming the storm, or driving out a pack of demons, or raising the dead He could not do in Nazareth. Why? Had His power deserted Him? Were there no demoniacs or recently dead people in Nazareth? Could He not deliver them and restore them to life, whatever His old friends and neighbors thought about it? Maybe not. “He was amazed by their unbelief.” Taken aback by their lack of trust. Without that trust, nothing He did would be recognized as a great deed of power, no matter what He, in fact, did.

Who knows? Maybe He did cast out demons and raise the dead in Nazareth, but the people who knew Him just saw these deeds as the more-or-less ordinary work of any traveling healer. God can, surely, act in the world without our knowing it. His power does not depend on our recognition. Jesus' inability to do deeds power in Nazareth is about our belief and recognition. God cannot communicate to us, either in word or deed, without our consent.

The modern age has sometimes bewailed the silence of God. God doesn’t speak to us anymore. But that complaint isn’t so new, really. It was the problem of which God warned Ezekiel, after all. And there is another problem. Typically, the prophets who are received are usually what scripture calls false prophets, the mercenary oracles who tell us what we want to hear; while the genuine prophets, like Ezekiel, are likely to get thrown out or killed, since we are an impudent, stubborn, and rebellious people. In fact, any prophet who is honored is somewhat suspect!

The Hebrews weren’t the only ones with this problem. Remember Cassandra? Daughter of Priam, the King of Troy? She was blessed by Apollo with ability to see the future, but also cursed by him so that no one would believe her prophecies. “Oh there goes poor, crazy Cassandra again!” Her name has become a byword for wigged-out prophets of doom. We use it to discredit hometown people who try to warn us. And isn’t that the height of irony? Like the Trojans, we have forgotten that a Cassandra is someone whose prophecies are true! But there are crazy prophets, and just because they say things that we don’t want to hear doesn’t guarantee that they are not false prophets.

Hearing God and receiving God’s deeds of power is not so easy. How do we open ourselves to the extraordinary ~ the divine ~ without opening ourselves to the demonic? I don’t propose to try to answer this question. I do suppose that the answer has something to do with love. With community and love. If we desire it, God will speak to us ~ but so will a lot of demons. We do well to be skeptical. We also do well to trust. But when to do which? For that, we need the grace of the Holy Spirit, moving among us, the grace for which the Collect prays today. We must be neither too credulous nor too skeptical, neither too quick to believe nor to reject. We must discern the spirits, and for that we need all the help we can get – reality checks from Holy Scripture, from Sacred Tradition, and from each other in the Holy Spirit. At least one thing is clear from today’s rather comfortless readings: God will not speak to us – cannot speak to us – without our permission.

AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS

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