God Will Raise Up a Prophet from Your Own Kin

Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

In today’s reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people that God has promised them that one of their own kin will take the place of Moses and will, like Moses, speak the Word of God to them. I am astonished, you may be as well, that the children of Israel actually said that they didn’t want to hear God speak to them directly. They were afraid that they would not live if they heard God’s voice and saw the fire that had appeared on top of Mount Sinai when God came down to speak with Moses. However, I wonder if they really ask for a different reason. I know that if I actually heard God’s voice, I would be very careful (and I think you would be as well) to do anything that God had asked of me. If God’s Word comes through an intermediary, it would be far easier to ignore that person. This is, in fact, why God’s Word as it is preached to them by Jesus, is ignored.

In the Gospel of St. John, when Philip runs to Nathaniel and tells him about Jesus, he describes Jesus for Nathaniel. “We have found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law, and also the prophets, Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” Of course, Jesus is much more than a human prophet. We can see that Nathaniel understands this by his answer to Jesus’ call to follow him: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.” Between the two of them, Philip and Nathaniel have given four different titles to the man from Nazareth. Philip refers to him as the one about whom Moses had written in the law. Nathaniel calls him Rabbi, the Son of God and the King of Israel. As we sit here today, we believe that Jesus is God in the flesh. The fact that the apostles did not know Jesus as God at first shows us just how much the first members of the Church had to develop in their understanding of what we today call the “Incarnation” and “Christology.” Yes, Jesus is all the things that Moses, Philip, and Nathaniel call him, but he is so much more.

However, before we look at the Christ, let us first come to an understanding of what God had promised through Moses. God says that the prophet will be “one of their own kin.” By that reference, we know that Jesus was totally human, related to the children of Israel through faith and blood. By extension, we have come to understand that Jesus is one of us and that Jesus knows how we are tempted and how we suffer. In the great hymn that St. Paul includes in his Letter to the Philippians, we are told that Jesus did not think of divinity as something to be grasped, rather, he emptied himself of his Godhead and “taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”

The Gospel passage for today clarifies all of this for us. When Jesus first enters the synagogue, it is the demons, creatures from the spirit world, who first recognize Jesus for what he truly is. Jesus’ rebuke of the demon sends it forth out of the man. While the demons have recognized him, it is obvious that the people have not. They are filled with questions. “What is this?” they ask, “a new teaching with authority” who commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him. Sadly, they never do come to recognize who Jesus is. It is remarkable that in the synoptic Gospels, the only ones who recognize Jesus for who he really is are the demons and the Roman centurion that witnesses his death. As John had written, “He came among his own, and his own knew him not.”

Moses nor any one of the dozens of prophets who populate the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures did not expect God to become one of us. At the same time, the people are warned that if they failed to listen to the words of this prophet, God will make them pay for ignoring him. Unfortunately, their ancestors had a long history of ignoring God’s commands. Our psalm response recalls one such moment in their history when their hardness of heart in the desert at Meribah tested and tempted God’s promises. Like their ancestors, many of Jesus’ contemporaries did not accept the Word of God as it was spoken by Jesus. He was not what they had expected. Rather than rescuing them from the oppression of the Roman Empire, Jesus had come to rescue them from their slavery to sin.

However, among the poor and those who were labeled as sinners, Jesus was accepted. He challenged those who laid heavy burdens upon them with their taxes and their insistence to observe the Torah. Jesus had come to deliver Good News to the poor: the afflicted, the lepers, the blind, the lame, the deaf and the mute. He healed their physical disability and taught them of God’s love, a love that he demonstrated by dying on the cross.

The message of the Scriptures for today is clear. We must listen to God’s word as it is proclaimed through the Scriptures. Ignoring them will find us regretting that decision when God decides that our sojourn in this world has come to an end as it does for every human being. It is not pleasant to think about the end of our lives, but it would be foolish to think of ourselves as immortal. “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.”