Friday 29 December 2017

Where is the Peace? A Christmas Sermon


One of my favourite Christmas hymns is 'It came upon the midnight clear', with its moving plea: 'O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.', and its hopeful ending: '... when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendours fling, and all the world send back the song which now the angels sing.'



But there is also something very depressing about it - the fact that we have been singing it since 1849, and its dream seems no nearer.



The Victorian era was one of great optimism. The advance of science and technology was improving the conditions of life for many. Europeans were confident in their Christian civilisation and busy exporting it to the rest of the world. There was a feeling that humanity was becoming more enlightened year by year and the kingdom of God was being built on earth.



But since then we have had two world wars, the Nazi Holocaust and the numerous other horrors of the twentieth century. And the twenty-first century so far seems even worse: terrorism, the atrocities of Isis, war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria and other places, more refugees than ever, many of them dying at sea, others living without shelter while Britain and other countries turn them away. We have the renewed threat of nuclear war, the threats to the whole planetary environment, xenophobia, prejudice and racism, the way powerful people whip up feelings of fear and hate, and the increasing nastiness that has crept into our political disagreements.



What does our faith have to say about all this? First, we must face the fact that the Old Testament prophets would say it was judgment, and in many ways that is true today. So much of the trouble we see is the result of generations, even centuries, of wrong values and wrong actions. We in the 'civilised' world are not entirely innocent. Terrorism is often a response to long term injustice and the way we have dominated and exploited other nations. Refugees are often driven by the poverty the richer nations have created by their selfishness and unrestrained profit-seeking. We are all part of this, and it is a judgment on us.



But the good news is that the God who judges is a God who loves. The message of the prophets is that God's purpose in judgment is not to have revenge, but to bring us to repentance that we may live and enjoy his blessings. To 'repent' means to change our ways. Christmas is an opportunity to do that if only in a small way: to be generous, to care about those in need, to follow up our adoration of the baby Jesus with a determination to create a world safe for children, to rejoice in goodwill, neighbourliness and fellowship, and to be reminded again that the most important thing is not money or power but love.



Many of the Jews in New Testament times were looking for a Messiah who would bring them victory in battle and  save them from their enemies. Many people of all nationalities still do. But Joseph was told: 'you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins'.



And how does he do that? Not by exercising power that forces us to change, but by coming in weakness: a child needing to be looked after, a condemned criminal dying on the cross, a little group of poor and 'insignificant' people who setting the pattern for a new world. God's way is not to destroy - it is to appeal to our compassion, to melt our hearts and transform humanity. It is slow work, but it is the only real hope, and God doesn't give up.


Wednesday 27 December 2017

Are the Prophets Jews, Christians or Muslims?


This is the text of a lecture I gave at the University of South Wales Chaplaincy to launch my book 'Sing Out for Justice: The Poetry and Passion of the Hebrew Prophets' on 29th November 2017


If you were looking for a factual historical answer, you would of course say they were Jews. But in fact this would not be quite correct. The word ‘Jew’ comes from the name of the tribe of Judah, who was a great-grandson of Abraham. This means that Abraham was not a Jew: he was called a Hebrew, a nomad from what is now Iraq. He had two sons, Ishmael – the ancestor of the Arabs – and Isaac. Isaac’s son Jacob was also called ‘Israel’, so his descendants were the Israelites, or ‘children of Israel’. One of his twelve sons was Judah, and his descendants are the Jews. So, for instance, the prophets Moses, Miriam, Deborah, Elijah and Elisha were Israelites, but they were not Jews.


To cut a long, complicated history short, the kingdom of Israel with its twelve tribes was eventually reduced to virtually the one tribe of Judah. And so all the Israelites who were left were ‘Jews’.



But of course my intention is not to answer the question literally. When the Jews became consolidated as a religious community with a faith we now call Judaism, they preserved, edited and gathered together the words of all the prophets, which became part of the Jewish Scriptures. In that sense all the prophets are Jews. The Jewish Scriptures were adopted by Christians as their ‘Old Testament’, so that the prophets are part of Christian history and their books are part of the Christian Bible. Later, many of these prophets came to be mentioned in the Qur'an, so that their story and their preaching are part of the Muslim faith too.



This means we could answer the question ‘were the prophets Jews, Christians or Muslims?’ by saying ‘all three’. They are an essential element in the three Abrahamic faiths. Each one of these faiths has claimed the prophets as its own, but they see their significance in different ways. I want to look first at these three different understandings of the prophets.



The Jewish View




In Judaism the Prophets are one of the three divisions of Scripture. The Jews often call the Scriptures the ‘tanak’. This is an acronym based on the Hebrew words for Law, Prophets and Writings (Torah, Nebi'im, Kethubim).



The Law (Torah) is basic. It consists of the first five books, those that are called the ‘books of Moses’: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Orthodox Jews believe that this Torah is an eternal divine entity given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. The role of the prophets was to comment on it and reinforce it. In the Jewish Scriptures the ‘Prophets’ include the history books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. These are not history in the modern, secular sense. They are not written simply to satisfy people’s curiosity. Nor are they patriotically motivated, to boost up the nation by telling its story. They are the story of God's dealings with his people, told from the point of view of the prophets. In a sense, they are sermons illustrated by history.

The Jewish Scriptures present the prophets as people who have a special relationship with God: people who are, as it were, taken into God's confidence. They receive a message to pass on to the people. The message is not the whole teaching of religion, but a specific message for the time and circumstances. It can be a prediction or warning addressed to an individual, but more often it is addressed to the whole nation through its leaders. The prophets are a vital link in the covenant relationship between God and the people of Israel.



They do not merely pass on what God tells them: they sometimes argue with God and have an influence on his decisions. One classic account of this is in a story about Abraham (Gen 18). God has seen the wickedness of the city of Sodom and resolved to destroy it, but he says to himself: ‘I will not hide from Abraham what I am going to do …’, and so he tells him. But then Abraham asks God: what if not all the people of Sodom are deserving of punishment? If, for instance, there are fifty righteous men in the city, will God destroy the righteous along with the wicked? God responds by promising that he will spare the whole city if he finds fifty righteous men in it. Then Abraham asks: what if there are only forty-five? This leads on to a conversation that sounds very much like the traditional haggling in an oriental market. What if there are only forty? Or twenty? Or ten? When Abraham has ‘beaten him down’ to ten, God walks away: that is his final offer. From the story that follows, it seems there were not even ten.



It is interesting to note that in the course of this argument Abraham appeals to God to be true to himself: ‘Should not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ Political campaigners often use this kind of technique. They challenge their government to act according to the constitution, or to live up to the best traditions and ideals of the nation. This is what Abraham is doing here, and some of the other prophets did it as well: challenging God to live up to his declared nature. This dynamic relationship of the prophets with God comes out in the portrayal of Moses, in which God does actually yield to persuasion. It is a feature of the book of Jeremiah and some of the others too. And so behind these conversations there is the earnest quest of the Jewish people to understand what is good and just.



In Judaism the prophets are seen as people very close to God, but they were not perfect, sinless people. They had their times of doubt, and sometimes God rebuked them for their mistakes or lack of faith. It is important to note too that not all the prophets were male. Miriam, Deborah and Huldah are mentioned as prophets.



In Jewish thinking the age of prophecy ended with Malachi, the last book in the ‘Prophets’ collection, and incidentally the last book of the Christian Old Testament. Jews believe so strongly in the supremacy of the Torah that sometimes they say that Moses knew beforehand what all the prophets were going to say. In other words, the prophets were drawing out messages that were already in the Torah received by Moses but not written. And so there can be no contradiction between the Torah and the Prophets.



The Christian View




Christianity began as a movement within Judaism. In the first century AD the Jews were talking a lot about the coming of the Messiah, or 'Anointed One', the new David who was going to set the Jewish people free from their oppressors and bring in the Kingdom of God. The followers of Jesus believed he was the Messiah. In fact the title 'Christ' is the Greek equivalent of ‘Messiah’, which means 'anointed'. In a sense Christianity began as an argument among the Jews as to whether Jesus was the Messiah or not. The early Christians searched the Jewish Scriptures for all the evidence they could find to back up their claim.



This is well illustrated in the story of Jesus, after the resurrection, talking with two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus, when he ‘explained to them what was said about himself in all the Scriptures, beginning with the books of Moses and the writings of all the prophets’ (Luke 24:27). The Apostle Paul at one point repeats what was already a kind of Christian ‘creed’: ‘I passed on to you what I received, which is of the greatest importance: that Christ died for our sins, as written in the Scriptures; that he was buried and that he was raised to life three days later, as written in the Scriptures . . .’ (1 Cor 15:3-4)



The early Christians saw the proof that Jesus was the Messiah in the way he fulfilled the predictions of Scripture. This led to the traditional Christian perception of the prophets that sees their main function, if not their only function, as pointing forward to Jesus. The favourite Old Testament book for the early Christians - the one most frequently mentioned in the New Testament - was Isaiah. It is interesting that the prophet Isaiah is one of those not mentioned at all in the Qur'an. For Christians the book of Isaiah is important because it is has the largest number of passages that Christians have interpreted as predicting Christ. It gives us:

·         the virgin conceiving and bearing a child (Isa 7)

·         the Son born to us who will be called Almighty God and Prince of Peace (Isa 9)

·         the voice crying in the wilderness who foreshadows John the Baptist (Isa 40)

·         the Servant who would bring light to all the nations (Isa 42 and 49) and would be wounded for our transgressions (Isa 53), and so on.  



Some Christian commentators have labelled Isaiah ‘the Fifth Gospel’, because it seems to be all about Jesus.



This perspective on the prophets comes out in the difference between the Jewish Bible and the Christian Old Testament. In a sense they are the same - they contain the same books. But the books are in a different order. In the Jewish tanak, the Torah comes first, then the Prophets, and then various other books that are called the ‘Writings’. The Christian Old Testament also starts with the Torah, but then it lumps all the historical books together, whether they belong to the ‘Prophets’ or to the ‘Writings’. Then come the poetic and philosophical books, and finally the Prophets. It looks as if Christianity has reshaped the Jewish Bible as an arrow to point to Christ.



The Muslim View




Prophecy is more central to Islam than it is to either of the other faiths. For the Jews, Torah is central, and the Prophets comment on it. For Christians, Jesus Christ is central, and the prophets point to him. But for Islam prophecy is in a sense the whole content of the faith. The Qur'an consists entirely of revelations to a prophet. The basic confession of the Muslim faith is, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger’, and the title given to Muhammad is ‘Prophet’.



There are 25 prophets mentioned in the Qur’an. Some of them are recognised Hebrew prophets like Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Jonah and Zechariah. Others are mentioned in the Bible but not called prophets: e.g., Adam, Noah, Lot, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Aaron, David, Solomon and Job. Two of them, John the Baptist and Jesus, are in the New Testament. The Qur'an also mentions other prophets without naming them. Interestingly, it does not mention some of the most prominent prophets in the Bible such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea and Amos.



Muslims believe that Muhammad is ‘the seal of the prophets’, the final one. They believe that each of the earlier prophets was sent to a specific people for a specific time, but Muhammad's message is for the whole of humanity for all time. Muslims respect other Scriptures, but believe that where they differ from the Qur’an they have been corrupted. Muslims believe that the prophets were perfect in their lives, free of all sin. They all preached the same message: the oneness of God, charity, prayer, pilgrimage, worship of God, fasting and the judgment. This means that from the Muslim point of view all the prophets were Muslims.



To complete the record we should mention the other, much younger, prophetic faith, that of the Bahai's. This religion came out of Islam in the 19th century. It differs from Islam chiefly in having a wider view of God's messengers, not confined within the Abrahamic succession. Baha'is believe that people such as Krishna, the Buddha and Zoroaster were part of the succession of special messengers through whom God has revealed himself to the human race. It is a kind of progressive revelation or step-by-step education of humanity. The latest messenger is Baha'ullah. He is not the final one, but he is the last one we will hear, because the next one will not appear for another thousand years.



And so we may answer the question ‘Are the Prophets Jews, Christians or Muslims?’ by saying ‘all three, and in a sense Bahai’s as well’.



An Alternative View




But I would also want to say that there is a sense in which they are ‘none of the above’. After all, in the lifetime of the prophets themselves none of those classifications existed. They lived in a culture that pre-dates them all. They would not have known that the words they preached to specific people in their own time would one day be part of the Holy Scriptures of three worldwide religions. They had their own issues to deal with, and their own things to say.



The understanding of the Bible, and indeed the Christian faith itself, has been deeply influenced by modern scientific methods of study. Scholars study the Bible as they would any other set of ancient writings. Historians and archaeologists compare it with other evidence from the same historical period. They also read ‘between the lines’ in the text itself, trying to work out how it was put together and what the original authors meant to say. Not all Christian believers are happy with this approach. They think it goes against reverence for the Bible as Holy Scripture. But what this reverence means in practice is reading into the Bible what we have traditionally been taught, trying to make it fit in with orthodox belief and turning a blind eye to the bits that don’t fit in. The modern way of reading is much more realistic, and in my opinion more respectful. It means looking honestly for the truth, and taking  the Bible seriously rather than literally. With this approach we notice things we did not notice before, and we can hear the individual voices of the prophets in their own lifetime and situation. To me, this brings the Bible to life and is far more interesting, inspiring and in the end challenging.



Take for instance the prophecy of Isaiah that we always read at Christmas carol services and hear in Handel's Messiah: ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’ (Isa 7:14). We usually just hear that one verse, which is quoted in the New Testament (Matt 1:23) as a prophecy of the birth of Jesus. But if we read the whole story in Isaiah from the beginning of the chapter, we get a different picture. Isaiah was speaking to Ahaz, the king of Judah. The people were in a state of panic because two of the neighbouring kingdoms were threatening to invade. Isaiah was urging the king to keep calm and not let himself be drawn into any foolish strategy. In order to reinforce his point he made a specific prediction. A young woman is pregnant, he said, and her son will be called Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us’. We do not know who this young woman was: it could be Isaiah’s wife, or a member of the royal family. The prediction is that by the time this child is old enough to know good from bad the whole situation will have been transformed, and the threat from those two kingdoms will be no more. It’s not quite clear what he meant by knowing good from bad. It could be, as one translation puts it, knowing right from wrong, in which case the child might be at least a few years old. On the other hand, it could be more immediate than that. As soon as a child is weaned and begins to eat food, that child knows what it likes and what it doesn’t like. But whichever it means, Isaiah was obviously not talking about a child who was going to be born 700 years later. That would have meant nothing to the people he was talking to, and would have given them no comfort or challenge.



Matthew’s Gospel in the New Testament takes up these words as a supernatural prediction that Jesus would be born of a virgin. This is based partly on an ambiguity in the meaning of a word. The Hebrew word generally means a young woman, but the early Christians mostly read the Scriptures in Greek, and the Greek word specifically means ‘virgin’. It is quite reasonable to say that the ancient words of the prophet Isaiah have acquired a new meaning, but that is not the same as saying that the main point Isaiah was making at the time was a prediction of the birth of Jesus.



We often think of a ‘prophet’ as someone who predicts the future, but this was not the main function of the biblical prophets. They weren't like Nostradamus or Old Moore's Almanac. Admittedly, there was a category of people who specialised in clairvoyance or soothsaying, but the classical prophets - the ones who have books in the Bible named after them - were generally nothing like that. Any predictions they made came either out of their good judgment or out of their faith. Like many wise politicians or journalists today, they could see more clearly than others the way things were going and what the outcome would be. But for the prophets it was not just a matter of political experience or judgment. It was their faith that inspired what they said. This faith told them that wrong actions would inevitably lead to disastrous consequences, but doing right and trusting God would always be the best policy in the long term.



The prophets were poets. Most of their books are in poetic form. They were also singers. In Isaiah there is a chapter (Ch 5) that starts: ‘I will sing for my beloved a song concerning his vineyard …’ In that culture vineyards and grapes had the kind of association that ‘June’ and ‘moon’ have today. Hear ‘beloved’ and ‘vineyard’, and immediately people would think, ‘Here comes a love song’. The song goes on to describe the care the singer’s ‘beloved’ took with his vineyard: preparing the ground, planting choice vines and preparing the vat to store the grapes. But the produce is disappointing. The grapes are useless for making wine – no better than wild grapes. He becomes angry at his vineyard: he threatens to take away its hedge and leave it defenceless, to be overgrown with briers and thorns, and even to command the clouds not to rain on it. This is obviously not just a story about the cultivation of grapes. It is the passionate outburst of a spurned lover. But then it moves into yet another dimension. The tone becomes grimmer. The singer points out that the vineyard is the nation and the vine grower is God. The image of Israel as a vine or a vineyard was also well known. The singer now spells out what the bad fruit is:



‘he expected justice,

but saw bloodshed;

righteousness,

but heard a cry!’



In the original Hebrew there is a dramatic juxtaposition of similar words: ‘justice’ is mishpat, ‘bloodshed’ is mishpach; ‘righteousness’ is tsedakah and ‘a cry’ is tse’aqah, a harsh guttural word to end what started as a sweet love song. This is a protest song. Isaiah today would be playing a guitar.



The prophets were protesters and demonstrators. Their concerns were very much the same as the concerns of protesters and demonstrators today: poverty, injustice, exploitation, lack of care for the vulnerable, the extravagant military ambitions of national leaders, and religious hypocrisy. All these issues come up in their books.



Listen to Isaiah talking about the rich women of his time. One can’t help feeling that he was a bit of a misogynist:



‘Look how proud the women of Jerusalem are! They walk along with their noses in the air. They are always flirting. They take dainty little steps, and the bracelets on their ankles jingle … A day is coming when the LORD will take away from the women of Jerusalem everything they are so proud of – the ornaments they wear on their ankles, on their heads, on their necks and on their wrists. He will take away their veils and their hats; the magic charms they wear on their arms and at their waists; the rings they wear on their fingers and in their noses; all their fine robes, gowns, cloaks and purses; their revealing garments, their linen handkerchiefs, and the scarves and long veils they wear on their heads. Instead of using perfumes, they will stink; instead of fine belts, they will wear coarse ropes; instead of having beautiful hair, they will be bald; instead of fine clothes, they will be dressed in rags; their beauty will be turned to shame!’ (Isa 3:16-24)



Isaiah was making a serious point about the gross inequality and injustice in the society of his time, but we can imagine that he rather enjoyed cooking up this piece of satire. This is the kind of thing that makes the Bible fun!



The prophets were particularly angry about the way the people flocked to the temple for religious worship and ritual and thought they were pleasing God, while they were promoting injustice and mistreating their neighbours. They made it quite clear what they believed God’s priorities to be. Listen to Amos:  



‘The LORD says, ‘I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies … Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’ (Amos 5:21-24)



In those days just as much as today, people’s thoughts would wander during worship. Amos could read their real thoughts:



‘You say to yourselves, “We can hardly wait for the holy days to be over so that we can sell our corn. When will the Sabbath end, so that we can start selling again? Then we can overcharge, use false measures, and tamper with the scales to cheat our customers. We can sell worthless wheat at a high price We’ll find a poor man who can’t pay his debts … and we’ll buy him as a slave.’…”’ (Amos 8:5-6). This somehow reminds me of things like Black Friday or the Boxing Day sales.



Or Isaiah again:



‘When you lift your hands in prayer, I will not look at you. No matter how much you pray, I will not listen, for your hands are covered with blood. Wash yourselves clean. Yes, stop doing evil and learn to do right. See that justice is done – help those who are oppressed, give orphans their rights, and defend widows.’ (Isa 1:15-17)



Like many poets, the prophets could have nightmare visions. Listen to this passage from Jeremiah that sounds almost like the aftermath of a nuclear war or an ecological disaster:



‘I looked at the earth – it was a barren waste; at the sky – there was no light. I looked at the mountains – they were shaking, and the hills were rocking to and fro. I saw that there were no people; even the birds had flown away. The fertile land had become a desert; its cities were in ruins …’ (Jer 4:23-26)



But they also had inspiring dreams:



‘They will hammer their swords into ploughs and their spears into pruning-knives. Nations will never again go to war, never prepare for battle again. Everyone will live in peace among his own vineyards and fig-trees, and no one will make him afraid.’ (Micah 4:1-4)

Then there is that lovely vision in the book of Isaiah about the prophet’s own city of Jerusalem:



‘The new Jerusalem I make will be full of joy, and her people will be happy … There will be no weeping there, no calling for help. Babies will no longer die in infancy, and all people will live out their life span. Those who live to be a hundred will be considered young … People will build houses and live in them themselves – they will not be used by someone else. They will plant vineyards and enjoy the wine – it will not be drunk by others …’ (Isa 65:17-25)



What a vision for the world we still live in today! No more lives cut short by poverty or violence, no more evictions, no more people robbed of their land by developers, or having their homes destroyed by bombing, no more people working in terrible conditions to provide luxury goods for others. The prophets can hold before us the hope of a fairer society not just in one city or one country but everywhere.



The prophets could also be demonstrators. They used what we today would call ‘street theatre’. Isaiah at one time went around barefoot with his buttocks exposed to show the privation that was going to come (Isa 20). Ezekiel did all sorts of peculiar things – lying on his side for days on end, cutting off his hair and doing strange symbolic things with it, digging a hole in the wall of his house and so on (Ezek 4-5 etc) – in order to warn people that Jerusalem would fall and her people would be deported.



Sometimes the prophets demonstrated in ways that directly affected their own lives. Ezekiel’s wife died, and he showed no sign of mourning because he wanted to drive it home to people that death would come to the nation with no chance to mourn (Ezek 24:15-18). Jeremiah said that God told him not to marry at all, so that he could show his conviction that disaster was coming (Jer 16:1-4). On the positive side, when the disaster came and the kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians and the people exiled, Jeremiah bought a bit of his ancestral land and hid the deeds, showing his confidence that one day things would be back to normal (Jer 32:6-15).



Hosea is one of the most remarkable of the books of the prophets. It says that God told Hosea to marry a prostitute. We don't know whether he actually heard a voice telling him to do that. It could be that Hosea's wife just turned out to be persistently unfaithful, and that in looking back he realised it was meant to be. Either way, Hosea's message was that his tormented relationship with his wife was a reflection of God's relationship with Israel - a tug of war between anger at their unfaithfulness and the love that made him want to forgive. Hosea gives us a rare and moving picture of the pain in the heart of God.



So the prophets were men and women of their own time, angry and tender, warning or promising, distressed or joyful, all according to the situation and their own personality. They lived in the thick of the issues of their time, admired by some and abused and persecuted by others. Elijah had to flee for his life. Jeremiah was despised as a traitor and imprisoned for a while. Ezekiel was probably regarded as a madman. He probably was slightly mad, but he was right about some things. There was constant conflict between 'true prophets' and 'false prophets', and it was often hard to tell the difference. Only time would show who was right. 



Jesus was well within the tradition of the prophets. His preaching could be tender and angry, serious and humorous. Like the prophets, he expressed his message in action – healing the sick, befriending outcasts – and we could say that his death on the cross was the supreme act of prophetic symbolism, demonstrating with his own life the infinite self-giving love of God.



Who are the prophets for our time?




As a 21st century Christian, I do not see ‘the prophets’ as a set group of people who lived a long time ago. I believe that God still speaks. And just as the prophets in their time were controversial figures not accepted by everybody, so today God can speak through unexpected and people and sometimes through despised people. The prophets for our time can be campaigners, popular singers and songwriters singing out their anger about injustice, poverty, war and violence, challenging the accepted values of the world and imagining a world that can be different. Perhaps sometimes even politicians can be prophets! Religion thinks of the prophets as respectable teachers of an unchanging truth, but actually they were passionate people, controversial, ahead of their time, shocking some people while they inspired others. They were constantly reinterpreting the religious tradition and sometimes contradicting those who had gone before them. They were embroiled in the difficult and divisive issues of their time. And they were not always right! They were human beings who made mistakes. There are even examples in the Bible of prophecies that turned out to be incorrect.



So among the prophets today I believe there are some who are Jews, some who are Christians and some who are Muslims. But there are some who are of other faiths and some who do not fit any religious category and cannot be confined to any box. They are people of all kinds who have the vision and the courage to ‘sing out for justice’. They are not just traditional religious teachers reinforcing what people already believe. Prophets are flesh and blood human beings living in the world, in the heart of its suffering and conflict. They take sides, and to take sides is to take risks. They are controversial characters, often mocked and persecuted. But the great thing about prophets is that they preach hope. They may not be infallible, and they may not be realistic, but they hold before us the possibility that there is another way.