Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

by Rowan Williams

think about the role of the prophet. What do prophets do in the Old Testament? They of course do more than just foretell the future. Much more importantly, they act and speak to call the people of Israel back to their own essential truth and identity. They act and they speak for the sake of a community’s integrity, its faithfulness to who it is really meant to be. Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Hosea are constantly saying to the people of Israel, ‘Don’t you remember who you are? Don’t you remember what God has called you to be? Here you are, sitting down comfortably with all kinds of inequality, injustice and corruption in your society. Have you completely forgotten what you’re here for?’ The prophet, therefore, is somebody whose role is always to be challenging the community to be what it is meant to be – to live out the gift that God has given to it. And so the baptized person, reflecting the prophetic role of Jesus Christ, is a person who needs to be critical, who needs to be a questioner. The baptized person looks around at the Church and may quite often be prompted to say, ‘Have you forgotten what you’re here for?’; ‘Have you forgotten the gift God gave you?’ And one of the very uncomfortable roles we have to play in the Church is to be prophets to one another – that is, to remind one another what we are here for. By that I don’t mean that every Christian needs to go around nagging every other Christian (attractive as that might be to some kinds of people). I mean r...