The Problem With Prophets

One of the shared convictions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is that most of the men and women venerated as true prophets suffered, and in some cases were even martyred for their messages. That belief helps us answer the question “What is a prophet, anyway?”

If a prophet were someone God called to foretell the future, it wouldn’t make sense that they’d be punished and killed for making predictions. If a friend says, “I think in the next decade, such and such will happen,” our first instinct wouldn’t be to arrest him or her, but instead respond, “Well, we’ll just have to wait and see” or “Time will tell, won’t it?”

What made prophets in the past so troubling was that instead of foretelling the distant future, they saw the deeper truth underlying the present. People aren’t upset by someone predicting what will happen in 2525, but they are upset by someone speaking or writing about something disturbing that is just below the surface in 2024. The familiar adage—“Don’t shoot me; I’m just the messenger” could as well be amended to “Don’t punish me; I’m just a prophet.”

That’s the meaning of Jesus’ words “A prophet is without honor in his hometown,” a saying that Mohammad as well as Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist could have uttered. In fact, in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, if prophets’ messages were well-received, these prophets were almost always exposed later as false messengers.

A person closer to our time whom now millions consider to be a true prophet is Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian farmer who was drafted into Hitler’s army in WWII. Jagerstatter didn’t intend to be a prophet; in fact, he wasn’t initially opposed to serving in the military.

Everything changed one night in 1938, when he had a disturbing dream. In his dream, he saw joyful Germans and Austrians boarding a train for a pleasurable outing. Everything about the image was bright and sunny, until he heard a voice saying, “This train is headed for hell.”

If you’re like me, when I wake from a nightmare, I’m happy to dismiss the dream as just that—only a dream. Jagerstatter was different. When he awoke, this simple farmer understood that the dream was about Hitler and Nazism. When he was called up to serve in the army, he refused. He stated his reason: he couldn’t be part of Nazism because he was a Christian.

Jagerstatter’s hometown responded just as Jesus had forewarned. They assumed Jagerstatter was stubborn; then the more he persisted, they believed he was crazy. When he was arrested, his wife, children, and other relatives pleaded with him to not be selfish, to think of his family. His priest also tried to convince him that his Christian duty was to serve in the army. Jagerstatter stayed true to his dream. Even when he was offered the chance to serve as medic in the army, he refused on Christian principles.

Hitler wasn’t going to allow Jagerstatter’s protest. He was tried and sentenced to be hanged. Last-minutes efforts to convince him to change his mind failed. When he died in 1943, his village wanted to forget about the crazy man who’d shamed his family and the town’s reputation. Jaggerstatter was no prophet; he was simply a looney.

In 2007, the town of Radegund was given a second chance to rethink their verdict of Jaggerstatter. That was when the Catholic Church recognized Jagerstatter as a blessed person, the step just below sainthood. His hometown will now likely become a pilgrimage site.

If true prophets aren’t honored in their own towns, it’s also true that they’re usually not honored in their own time. That leaves us with the disturbing question: who in our midst is a true prophet?