The Prophetic Work of Jesus

Sunday 
We are free to understand Jesus as more than a prophet, but we should never understand him as less. His prophetic tradition should form the core and the baseline of our understanding of Jesus. 
—Brian McLaren 

Monday 
The prophets honor the tradition, and they also say what’s phony about the tradition. That’s what fully spiritually mature people can do.   
—Richard Rohr 

Tuesday 
Prophecy comes to life as love. Jesus the prophet is love manifested. We also can be love manifested in the world. —Barbara Holmes 

Wednesday 
To say that Jesus was a political revolutionary is to say that the message he proclaimed not only called for change in individual hearts but also demanded sweeping and comprehensive change in the political, social, and economic structures in his setting in life: colonized Israel.  —Obery M. Hendricks Jr. 

Thursday 
Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.  —Walter Brueggemann 

Friday 
Let us be carriers of the gospel. The gospel of the revolutionary, brown-skinned Palestinian Jew who made it very clear that he didn’t come to be status quo. He wasn’t a chaplain of the empire but a prophet of God.  —Liz Theoharis and Charon Hribar 

Week Forty-Two Practice

Let This Silence Become a Bridge

Poet and CAC staff member Drew Jackson offers this poem, praying to find the courage of the prophets: 

I wake in the morning and sink down into the quiet Center. 
Before the news and the heartbreak. 
Before the world becomes all fire and brimstone. 
Tell me, is this salvation? 
I could stay here, alone and away. 
I could place my life in the company of the undisturbed. 
But if I do, I will surely lose You. 
Friend of Sorrows. Acquaintance of Grief. 
Let this silence, then, become a bridge. 
Let me walk it to where Love is. 
At the edges. Amidst the rubble. 
Trudging among the bones 
Where the prophets call to the four winds 
And a Voice cries out saying Live! Live! 
Let this silence become a forgotten thing 
If it does not lead me to the hill 
Outside the camp.[1]