Would that all the people of God were prophets!
Sep. 21, 2009 by hweidner
The book of Numbers is about the numbers of Hebrews that went with Moses across the desert to the promised land. It is a delightful book.
Part of the delight is how Moses handled the organization of this great crowd of ex-slaves. Foundational to the organization was a sense that Moses was a prophet…a leader who, for all his faults, the Spirit raised up most unexpectedly. Moses is the archetype prophet. And although he is the archetype, he will not get into the Promised Land. That is a whole other meditation.
What concerns us here is that God has Moses gather 70 potential leader prophets into a tent where some of the Spirit given Moses will be shared out among this leadership. Two miss the meeting and received the Spirit anyway and start prophesying. Moses staff people object. Moses says, “Would that all the people of God were prophet!”
Moses is eager to share the glory and the burden.
We know in group dynamics that a whole group can go down the drain if there is a bully there beating out people who might have the answer but who do not get a chance to get the idea on the table.
In the Church we can ask ourselves what if, for instance, a huge number of, say, Zen Buddhists, wanted to join the Church. What would be do with them? Could we use their gifts? Would they have to turn into clones of us so that all we got was more workers but no new ideas or experiences? What if there were a huge group of people who learned Hebrew and had studied the Jewish scriptures and then decided to come into the Church…what would we do with them?They would know the Bible Jesus knew and a language and a set of ideas that Jesus knew. Would it mean nothing to us? We have not bothered to learn Hebrew. A translation is good enough for us. Of course, we do not know Greek either and so the Gospels are kept at a distance too. Do we need to have great intelligence and mastery of languages to be a Christian? Well, of course not, but wouldn’t it be great if we had room for and could make use of people with so many gifts?
John Henry Newman was criticized because he made so few converts. He said that was not his job. He said his job was preparing the Church to receive converts.
