“Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets! Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!”

          The prophets were misunderstood people. By our Lord’s time, they were held in great reverence, but in their own day they were persecuted, reviled, and even killed – like the just man we saw last week in the Book of Wisdom. But even today we get the prophets all wrong. Our image of them is almost always as a fortune teller, only with divine rather than demonic powers. While there are some prophecies like this in the Old Testament – most famously, Isaiah’s prophecy that the Virgin will conceive and bear a Son – the vast majority of the prophetic books is not dedicated to “prophecies” of future events at all.

          If prophecy were primarily about foretelling future events, the seventy men prophesying in the Israelite camp might have given Moses some clues about how to get to the Promised Land in less than forty years! Quite evidently, they didn’t. The role of prophecy is more often speaking the truth in difficult times. The prophets excoriate the corrupt leadership of Israel and call the people back to upright moral living.

          Christ, as the fulfillment of the Old Covenant, is priest, prophet, and king. As priest, He offers not the sacrifices of the Temple – He is not a priest of the line of Aaron like the Jewish High Priests – but the sacrifice of Himself. He is the successor of King David, the new king whose kingship far exceeds that of David and Solomon of old. He also presents Himself as the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets – giving a new law of charity from the Mountain, fulfilling the law given to Moses from Mount Sinai, and boldly speaking out against the successors of those held to account by Ezechiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. While our Lord does foretell some future events – “destroy this Temple, and I will raise it in three day” – His prophetic office also consists in holding the hypocritical scribes and pharisees accountable for their lackluster leadership of the chosen people.

          To be a Christian is to carry around the dying and rising of Christ in our own bodies, and to live these three offices into which we have been initiated by our baptism. Having the gift of prophecy sounds like a scary charismatic experience to most Catholics, but living the office of prophet entrusted to every Christian is not about muttering in an unrecognizable tongue while in a trance. You are called to be a prophet by courageously speaking the truth when it is hated or just ignored.

          The reason we do not live our prophetic vocation is not because of not having been to the right prayer meeting or having the right experience while on a retreat. We fail to live our prophetic vocation because we are too attached to the things of this world, which is why we hear this challenging exhortation from St. James today: “Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries. … Your [wealth’s] … corrosion will be a testimony against you; it will devour your flesh like a fire.”

          This happens to us personally, when standing up for the truth (in prudence and charity, of course) could cost us a job, a promotion, or a business deal. It has happened in many places to the Church as well, like the notorious contemporary example of the Church in Germany, drunk on tax money and careening towards mass apostacy in the model of state-sponsored Protestant churches all over northern Europe.

          Christ tells us today that to enter Heaven, we should cut off any occasions to sin. Curiously, though we have no record of the Apostles mutilating themselves. Surely there were Apostles who struggled against sins of the tongue, or who needed to discipline a roving eye. And yet, Christian tradition has universally condemned mutilating the human body, even with the best of intentions. (So, you can add today’s Gospel to John chapter six and all the other ones that make fundamentalism a tough pill to swallow.)

          Remember what our Lord told us four weeks ago: “From within people, from their hearts, come [all sorts of sins]. All these evils come from within, and they defile.” It is the desires of our hearts that need to be disciplined.

          Those three offices of the Christian are deeply interconnected. Like a three-legged stool, each one falls without the others. Those who are too attached to the things of this world will not be true prophets. And in order not to be attached to the things of this world, we need the priestly and kingly offices. The essence of the priesthood is offering sacrifice – and for the Christian, that means following the model of Christ, who was uniquely the victim priest, who offered not bullocks and goats, but Himself. Sacrificing material goods not just to provide for the needs of others, but to desire more fully a life beyond this world, is an essential part of the Christian life.

          To be a king after the model of Christ is obviously not to rule haughtily over others. It is to rule over oneself, to discipline the unruly passions that lead us astray, and to mortify (that is, put to death) the fleshly desires in us – not because they are bad in themselves, but because they need to be purified and sanctified, since those desires suffer the consequences of original sin, and so easily lead us astray.

          This is obviously a generous community, in which people respond joyfully and unhesitatingly to the needs of others. Last Sunday, our parish raised more money for the St. Vincent De Paul Society’s service of the poor than parishes that are much bigger and wealthier than ours. I’ve seen many other ways too in which people come together without being asked to support those with many different needs.

          Our Lord makes clear in the Gospel, though, that generosity to the poor is not all that He is asking. He calls His disciples to something more radical: to live in solidarity with the poor. For centuries, the Church has aways regarded the perfection of Christian living (in the religious life) to include complete personal poverty. At the same time, we also have the unhesitating affirmation that it is possible to live a life of real holiness in many different walks of life, with Christian saints who have come from every echelon of society.

          So how do we resolve this dilemma? It is not a sin to be rich (and even if you aren’t a millionaire, let’s keep in mind that even Solomon in all his splendor did not know the glories of air conditioning – when compared to the rest of the world and the rest of history, we are all rich). But it is sinful to live in a way that is 1) Not mindful of the poor and 2) Not lived in solidarity with the poor.

          In the United States in the year of our Lord 2024, one of the biggest challenges faced by Christians is our culture of mass consumerism. Technology has made it incredibly easy for us to accumulate large quantities of things of very little value. This creates a structure of poverty by luring those with limited means into buying cheap products that will not last and are of too poor quality to be repaired, replacing them over and over again and ultimately transferring wealth from the poor to the richest of the rich.

One way to resist that culture is not just to buy less, but simply to slow down. Delete every shopping app from your phone, and see how much less you buy when you have to sit down and open up an actual computer to buy something online. Don’t buy anything online until it has sat in your shopping cart for at least 24 hours – just live without it for a little bit longer – and you will realize that it was not so essential after all.

          Another path of resistance to consumerism is buying things that are used and learning to repair things that are broken. It is common to lament the lack of skilled tradesmen – even getting a quote for electrical or plumbing work can take months. I wonder, though, if there is not just a shortage of tradesmen, but a compounding shortage of skill on the part of the average American. How many of us have fathers who could install a faucet or wire an outlet, and find ourselves clueless when faced with basic household repairs? Solidarity with the poor could mean reviving lost skills that many people have no choice but to do for themselves.

          Mass consumerism with a thin veneer of Christianity on top is simply not Christianity at all. If our lives beat with the rhythms of the world, they are not Christian lives. Resisting the culture of mass consumerism is not just a marginal add-on to a Christian life. It is absolutely essential for living a prophetic witness in the world. When we live consumeristic lives, our words are dull and uninspiring. They fail to convince, and they fail to inspire. That’s because what Amazon, Walmart, and everyone else are selling you is not just junk that takes up too much room in your shelves and drawers, but an empty vision of the good life that takes up too much room in your heart.

          While it is true that there have been saints of great power and wealth, those saints only inspired others to live the Gospel when they set aside the trappings of their office and the luxuries of their wealth to live in solidarity with the poor. Putting the brakes on American consumerism, becoming more circumspect about how and what we buy, is an important part of prophetic witness in our world, because before being about what we do, Christianity is first and foremost about what and whom we love. Ruling over our desires for material possessions as real baptismal kings and queens, sacrificing our desire for more and better as baptismal priests, we can discover the courage to live an authentically prophetic life, with gold and silver that does not corrode, and wealth that does not rot away.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

XXVI Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV