Chapel Address at Evensong, St Stephen’s House, Oxford, 4 November 2019
Gerry Lynch
“When you talk to God, it’s called prayer. When God talks to you, it’s called insanity.”
That bon mot came to mind as I pondered today’s readings from the first chapters of Daniel and Revelation, two of the most misunderstood and misused books of the Bible, yet also among the most transcendent.
Prophecy has always been a tricky topic in the Church – St Paul admonished the Corinthian Church about it. The soldiers who beat up the blindfolded Jesus demanded he guess which of them had struck him. They were confusing prophecy and fortune-telling. It is still a common mistake, and made as much within the Church, or at last at its fringes, as it is outside it. The YouTube fanatics who drop random texts from Revelation to confidently predict the arrival of doomsday next Wednesday have done tremendous damage to the Church.
The Belfast of my boyhood was thick with these chancers. There was even a BBC children’s TV drama of the early 1980s, set in Belfast, about one of these street corner Jeremiahs, entitled The End of the World Man. Of course the title character was nothing but a hypocrite, setting himself up in self-righteous judgement while using his political connections to facilitate a corrupt land deal to destroy a patch of urban wilderness much loved by our televisual child heroes. If you want to lampoon the Church, these self-proclaimed prophets are an easy way to do it. And they are terribly unbiblical. The end will come like a thief in the night; it is not ours to know when and how it will come; Jesus says this very directly in St Matthew’s Gospel.
Yet outside the world of fundamentalist Protestantism, the Church has in recent generations tended to go in the opposite direction, reducing prophecy to mere political commentary. Of, course, the Church must speak unwelcome truths to power. John the Baptist stands as a perpetual reminder of that duty and its potential cost. But if your ‘prophetic words’ could have appeared a Guardian column, then they may not actually be very prophetic.
At the same time, we must, surely, speak in judgement of a materialistic socio-economic order that is literally burning itself alive? I think part of doing prophecy correctly is to root it in an understanding that there will never be a perfect political order. The putative prophet must arm themselves with prayer and a copy of The Economist, with a Bible and a bevy of official statistics, but most of all with a rootedness in the Christian understanding of human nature and the limits of human capacities. Without that, we risk making an idol of our secular political views, misappropriating God to place them beyond criticism. By the way, all these risks apply just as much to people who take The Telegraph and The Spectator.
Most of all, prophecy requires a large dollop of humility. The priest, the prophet, the Church – none of them see God’s truth except through a darkened mirror. If the prophet is to proclaim God’s truth rather than merely setting themselves up as an idol, that is perhaps the most important grounding point of all.
