Septuagesima: A Prophet Like Me

In our Hebrew bible reading today [Deut. 18: 15-20] the text has Moses promising to send "a prophet like me" and warns against listening to prophets who represent foreign deities or who speak a message not authorized by the God of Israel.  Finding a prophet like Moses is a tall order.  After all, Moses has brought us the Mosaic Law, a new and improved version of Hammurabi's Code and it is noted for reflecting compassion, social consciousness, and humane values unusual in those days. Yes, the Law of Moses contains barbaric rubbish but it also contains wonderful provisions for slaves, and widows and orphans.  It is a watershed document.

Later when Israel becomes established with a fixed capital, temple, and monarchy, it turns into the Establishment it previously panned and begins to cave in to false values like greed and exploitation.  Prophets were raised up to send the people a message that you have nice liturgies but God is paying no attention because you aren't practising what you preach.  You have betrayed your raison-d'etre as God's "drafted people."

In time the one we hail as the Prophet-like-Moses one who appeared with a kind of two-fold mission.  First, Jesus torqued up Torah.  He condemned the loopholes players had drilled in order to build their power and wealth at the expense of the poor and needy..  He challenged his Jewish hearers to a more acute hearing of the Word:  you have been told not to kill, I say don't hate; you have been told not to commit adultery, I say don't lust. 

Second, in Christian articulation, he did serious fulfillment of the Law.  For example, YHVH was one of a pantheon of Canaanite deities, portrayed as a capricious, unstable, bloodthirsty old man with white hair seated on a golden throne.  As Jews moved from monolatry to monotheism, God was pure spirit, not capable of being represented by any kind of image.  However, we humans process largely through five natural senses.  In Jesus as Word made Flesh, we see the human face of God.  Christians can see God loving, caring, serving, suffering -- in the person of Jesus.  Under the Law, forgiveness was oblique, relief depending on one's confidence that prescribed animal and material sacrifices would lead God to forgive.  Jesus gives his Church authority to continue his ministry of forgiving sins, assuaging guilt and making the penitent whole.  Under the Law, one was strictly forbidden to ingest blood,  because life resides in blood.  Jesus gives to his Church authority to celebrate the Eucharist, to make his Sacrifice present again and to feed us for ministry.

Thus in word and sacrament the Church carries on the work of the Christ right through time, guided, as Jesus assured us, into all truth by the Holy Spirit.  We do not put a period where God puts a comma.  We remain open to new revelation through the equal sources of the "three-legged stool," Scripture, Catholic Tradition, and Reason/Experience.  We carry on in the name of the Prophet who was came and changed everything forever.