These Days All Prophets Are False

Wednesday of the 12th Week of Ordinary Time

The Gospel for today tells us to beware false prophets. There are wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing who would deceive us into following them, and Christ tell us to recognize these prophets by their fruits.

The problem is that sometimes it is hard to know what is good fruit in real time. Last week, I watched a new documentary on Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre. Jim Jones was certainly a wolf dressed up in sheep’s clothing, but it took the death of over 900 people for everyone to realize the guy was a false prophet. Why? Because we are all weak and vulnerable in our own way, looking out there in the world for someone to follow who is standing right there in front of us. Someone comes along who uses the right language, tells us what we want to hear, and suddenly you get hundreds of people moving to Guyana for a ‘better’ life, and for a few years it looks like good fruit is being born. And then one day you learn the wolf is a wolf because the sheep are poisoned.

Fortunately for us, there are three sound ways to identify a false prophet.

Here is the first: remember that false prophets look for every opportunity to talk about themselves. A false prophet might talk about God or Christ some of the time, but always in reference to themselves. There will be plenty of first-person exhortations: “I have something you need to hear,” “it is important that you read what I wrote,” “there is something I know that must be shared with you,” “follow me and you will receive your reward,” et cetera et cetera. If you hear someone using that kind of language, you are looking at a false prophet.

Real prophets refer to themselves as little as possible for the sake of talking about God or Christ. While a false prophet wants to live as the middle term that connects you to divinity, a real prophet just wants to point toward Christ, redirect the attention, remain in the shadows to whatever extent possible.

Here is the second way to identify a false prophet: a false prophet uses the language of prophecy to just do whatever they want in life. A false prophet talks about the divine will, but what really matters to them is using the language of religion to justify their own needs or preferences. A real prophet subordinates their personal will to the will of God, and they suffer for it. Think of the lives of Jeremiah, John the Baptist, or even Christ himself. The subordination of your will to the will of God always takes a particular form: it is hard, and oftentimes you will end up doing something that you would otherwise not want to do. False prophets don’t really suffer because false prophets just do whatever they want, but tell you it is what God wants.

Here is a third way to identify a false prophet: remember that we no longer live in an age of prophecy but an age of fulfillment. In Christ, all things have been fulfilled. There are no more prophets in the world, real or false. We live in an age of fulfillment, and the hero of our age is not the prophet but the saint. And saints get life right in two main ways: (1) a real saint makes their whole life a reference to God, never boasting, never wanting attention, never using language that makes them important or necessary, never building a cult of personality, and (2) a saint subordinates their will to God each day, suffering for their choice, making their life into an oblation offered back to the Lord. You will see a saint doing plenty of things that they do not want to do because that is what is asked of them.

These days all prophets are false, but there are many people claiming to be prophets— inside the Church and outside the Church. The question to ask yourself: is that person a saint, because otherwise they are most likely a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Homily preached on Wednesday, June 26th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary