What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind?
What kind of sound does a reed make when it is shaken by the winds of the world? A rattle, or a sigh; a dry clacking; even a breathy note that sounds like mourning; perhaps a castanet-like clicking that recalls the rhythms of dancing. The sounds of a reed in a reedbed on a windy day cannot speak sense, but they sound as if they might be telling a story we cannot understand. Not until the reed has been plucked, trimmed with a knife, put to someone’s lips, and made to resonate against a wooden body made from part of a dead tree will it speak the wordless sense of music, in shawm, or hautboy, or pipe.
When Jesus asks of the crowds following him: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at?” He is—not for the first time—giving way to his sense of irony. He looks at the sea of expectant faces—a sight that sometimes stirs in him compassion and sometimes a kind of impatient fury—and he says, “What on earth did you think you were doing when you rushed out of the city to listen to John? What did you expect this ill-dressed ascetic living in discomfort in a barren landscape to mean to you?” And to make his point, he turns the man into an aspect of the landscape. “You might as well,” he hints, “go to some isolated reedbed and listen to the sound of the wind.”
All across the Scriptures that Jesus knew—the body of writings we call the Old Testament—there are prophets: people who reveal hidden truths to societies looking the other way. And all across the prophets’ writings runs the divine warning that the words they speak will be neither heard nor understood. Isaiah has a vision of the glory of God in the Temple “in the year King Uzziah died”: almost as soon as he has received it he is told that the people to whom he is sent will not be able to hear or see the glory he is sent to show them. His work will be both necessary and apparently futile.
Prophets are often described as those who “speak truth to power,” and that is so, but another way of putting that is to say that prophets attempt to turn people’s eyes and ears away from the dominant sights and sounds of human power and toward the truths of divine seeing and hearing. Away from the “soft robes” and luxurious settings of a king’s palace, toward the cleansing waters of the baptismal river, the sacrificial self-offering of a healer—so that what kingship means is turned upside-down; so that to reign is to serve. Away from the kinds of speaking that flatter with lies, and toward a plain speaking that exposes the secrets of the heart.
When prophets speak, they do not only challenge how things are: they realign the heart so that power emerges in completely different places: in the vulnerability of a child, a widow, a sick person, a dying body; in a landscape that does not look as if it could ever be tilled into a fruitful garden. People and places that do not look “useful” turn out to be something better than useful: they turn out to be holy. The role of the prophet is to show the holy in the place you never expected to find it.
In the unprofitable business of caring for the sick and the poor, the homeless and the sorrowful, the prisoner and the infant, the wicked and the lost. In the voice of conscience, when service to the common good overcomes the desire for personal display or short-term personal gain. In a complete redefinition of what “value” might even mean in the God’s-eye view that will reveal the destroyed and abandoned body of a political criminal to be the Savior of the whole world, infusing that body with irrepressible and eternal life, blowing the wind of the divine breath through its mortal stuff of flesh and bone. The truths of prophecy will not be found in the triumphant greedy luxury of human power. The truth whispered by the reeds is that God turns the wilderness into his garden, the forgotten into his beloved, invites the hungry to his banquet and the despised to his honor.
And this, says the prophet, changes the landscape. When the breath of God blows through the reedbed, the reeds sing. The whole land is glad, with a gladness like rain soaking the dry seeds hidden in the dust until as far as the eye can see is crocus blossom. When the breath of God breathes through our wants and lacks, we see those things we could not see before, hear the sounds of God’s joy, walk and run in undefended safety toward the holy city.
Those are the sounds that murmur in the dry places of our lives, not to be found in the short-term satisfactions that deafen us to God’s unexpected voice, but in the longings of the heart. Prophets are there to remind us that we long to hear God say, “Turn and be rescued from yourself; turn toward the costly demands of love; turn away from the palace and toward the stable; turn away from the king and toward the helpless baby. The meaning that makes you is not in your control. Remember that God shaped you for his loving purposes, and be glad.”
“What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.” A messenger of the presence of the Lord; the herald of the one who brings God so close to humanity that God will inhabit our blood and bone. “Yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”
And it is that kingdom to which we are invited; it is that kingdom for which we watch and wait. It is that kingdom of which the prophets speak, turned at an unexpected angle from the kingdoms of this world, and it is that kingdom for which we pray:
O Lord, who hast set before us the great hope that thy kingdom shall come on earth, and hast taught us to pray for its coming: Give us grace to discern the signs of its dawning, and to work for the perfect day when thy will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
