The Curse of Wisdom (Deuteronomy 18:15-20)

Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex contains a deep reflection on the nature of prophets and prophecy. A blood plague has beset Thebes, and the king, Oedipus and the rest of the populace desperately want to know how to stop the devastation. A cryptic report comes in from Delphic Oracle that the murderer of the old king now causes the current illness. Then, the blind prophet, Teiresias, arrives, and Oedipus immediately seeks his help. Teiresias does knows the truth, both of the matter and the struggle of prophets.

Wisdom is a curse
              when wisdom does nothing for the man who has it.
              Once I knew this well, but I forgot
              I never should have come.
              (Sophocles, Oedpius the King, Translated by Berg and Clay, lines 429-433)

He bears the curse of knowing who killed the old king, and that this wisdom will not help him. Oedipus keeps pushing. Teiresias keeps deflecting, until, finally, Oedipus shifts to personal attacks on the prophet’s integrity. Teiresias delivers the truth to a predictable result.

              Teiresias:                          You, it’s
                            you.
                            What plagues the city is you.
                            The plague is you.

              Oedipus: Do you know what you’re saying
                            Do you think I’ll let you get away with these vile accusations?

              Teiresias: I am safe.
                            Truth lives in me, and the truth is strong.

              Oedipus: Who taught you this truth of yours? Not your prophet’s craft
              (Sophocles, Oedpius the King, Translated by Berg and Clay, lines 479-487)

It’s literally a tale as old as time. (Spoilers for a 2,500 year old play) Teiresias knows that Oedipus, without knowing it, killed his father, the old king, and married his mother, the current queen. Oedipus was sent away from his family because of a prophecy when he was a baby. He had no idea that the rulers of Thebes were his parents or that the man that he killed on the roadside was his father. Eventually, the full truth comes out, and Oedipus suffers for rejecting the words of Teiresias. Still, the prophet delivers the divine truth placed within him only to have those words rejected and his character questioned.

In a similar vane, the Old Testament contains a vast graveyard of ignored prophecy. For every Nineveh repenting at Jonah’s words and David falling before the prophet Nathan after the Bathsheba liaison, we hear volumes from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others telling God’s people how to avoid an exile. The nation failed to heed their warnings, and away to exile, they went. Hosea spends his prophetic career telling the Northern Kingdom to turn from their growing heresy, which they promptly ignored. Despite the fact that the role of prophet means serving has a conduit for God’s truth, the bulk of our collected prophetic witness falls on deaf ears. The curse of wisdom remains consistent.

The New Testament adds its own spin on the suffering of prophets. John the Baptist gets his head put on the platter. Jesus goes to the cross in part because a certain subset of folks didn’t like the divine truth that he had to say. Stephen gets stoned to death immediately after he takes a prophetic turn. And, in Revelation 10, John has to confirm his new role of prophet, by eating a scroll.

So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, ‘Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.’ So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter.

Then they said to me, ‘You must prophesy again about many peoples and nations and languages and kings.’ (Revelation 10:9-11 NRSV)

The sweetness derives from delivering the word of God, but it comes with a discomforting bitterness of often going unreceived. John immediately relates a vision of that bitterness in the next chapter. Two prophets warn the people of their coming doom for 1,260 days. For their service, the beast comes up from the depths and kills them, and the people celebrate this move.

For three and a half days members of the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb; and the inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and celebrate and exchange presents, because these two prophets had been a torment to the inhabitants of the earth. (Revelation 11:9-10 NRSV)

God rewards their faithfulness by raising them from the dead and welcoming them into Heaven, but the people that they gave their lives to save suffer the exact fate that these prophets sought so diligently to help them avoid.

Across time and cultures, the pattern begins to feel like destiny. The prophet speaks divine truth. We ignore it and potentially harm the prophet for their attempt to help. It seems like more often than not we fail to heed God’s instruction in Deuteronomy 18 to heed. God warns us that this failure will come with consequences. We continue in our generations long project of ignoring God’s word prophetically delivered.

These may be words spoken by a human, but the concept of prophecy is that God put these words into the mouth of said human. Prophets get ignored because often, they deliver the messages from God that we don’t like to hear. We like our words of comfort and grace from God. Sometimes, like the return from Exile passages in the third section of Isaiah or the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel, prophets get the nice job that people love. “You get to go home!” “God can breathe life into even the direst looking situation!” However, following in the tradition of Moses catching the people worshipping a calf and delivering the Law, prophets spend a good chunk of their time on the accountability and uncomfortable truth end of divine communications. We tend to detest and avoid anything that sounds too much like a bummer or getting called out. Thus, we inflict the curse of wisdom on the prophet and ignore the knocking of the divine.

Given that Sophocles wrote two millennium ago and still remains on many high school and college curriculums, one might think that we would learn. Deuteronomy 18 is even older and contained in arguably the best selling book of all time. You can even steal it from most hotel rooms. Still, we don’t learn. We don’t heed. We keep faceplanting into the consequences. We should try breaking the curse and see what it’s like on the other side.