000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

134 Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany/Year B
(Deut. 18:21). While preachers often say that prophecy is less about predicting
the future and more about speaking for God (the word “prophet”
is from two parts: “to speak” and “for”), the Deuteronomic criterion for
the trustworthiness of a prophet sometimes involves a future element.
The authors of this book have no doubt that God continues to speak
through prophets and other media. However, congregations must often
make decisions regarding how to respond to particular messages that purport
to be prophetic without the advantage of knowing whether a message
will actually come to pass. Given human finitude, it is more theologically
honest to think that we seek the most adequate interpretations of God’s purposes
for the world than that we deal with pure, unquestionable messages
from God. We therefore suggest a supplementary criterion for interpreting
the adequacy of a prophetic message: the degree to which a prophet’s
message coheres with the community’s deepest understanding of God’s
purposes. A prophet is similar to an ombudsperson whose work is to measure
how well a community lives out its values, and to call attention to
points at which the community needs to amend its behavior and to points
at which the community embodies its deepest understanding of the divine
purposes. Of course, the community needs to have conversation about such
matters. Thinking together often brings to the surface questions and perspectives
that do not come to individuals reflecting alone.
While the Gospel reading for today, Mark 1:21–28, does not refer
explicitly to Deuteronomy 18:15–20, the picture of Moses in Deuteronomy
does provide a generic frame within which to understand Jesus as an
agent of God.
Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany/Year B
Isaiah 40:21–31
Chapter 40:1–11 is a message of comfort addressed to the people in exile
in Babylonia. The rest of the chapter is a dispute with the people as to the
credibility of this promise. It takes little imagination to understand the
questions that a long-exiled people would put to a prophet who had just
spoken what to them appeared to be an outrageous promise. Everything
in their immediate experience argued to the contrary: YHWH’s people
had been defeated in war by Babylon and the god Marduk; the people were
in exile among Babylonians who were doing quite well, particularly as
compared to the poverty in devastated Judea. And these Babylonians
could point to Marduk as having defeated YHWH and YHWH’s people.