Follow the Prophets NOW

22 March 2026  Ezekiel 37:12-14, John 11:1-45

The Fifth Sunday of Lent

“I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.” (Ezekiel 37:14)  

In the summer of 1864 it looked to most observers, including Abraham Lincoln, that the President would not be re-elected. If that had happened, then the Civil War would almost certainly have ended with a negotiated peace that even more certainly would have included the continuation of slavery. George McClellan, Lincoln’s opponent in the election, considered Lincoln a meddlesome troublemaker, and his handling of the Civil War a national disgrace. Southerners still talked about “the Potomac [as] crimsoned human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue…paved fathoms in depth with mangled bodies.”

What do you do with troublemakers and weirdos who talk about opening tombs and raising people from the dead, and then revive Jairus’ daughter (Matthew 9:18-26), the Widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7:11-17), and Lazarus (John 11:1-45)? In their own time, you try to have them killed. Maybe build them a monument later on.

There were many in the 1980s who did not want communism to end, so, to no one’s real surprise, when the Sacred College of Cardinals elected a pope from Poland in the Fall of 1978, it was not long before an attempt was made on his life. On 13 May 1981, a Bulgarian assassin, almost certainly with the approval of Moscow, shot the nuisance Pope John Paul II twice in St. Peter’s Square.

Today there is a Lincoln Memorial, and dozens of monuments and shrines to St. John Paul. It seems we are good at remembering prophets, less good at recognizing their actual voices among us in their own time.

What do you do with troublemakers and weirdos who talk about opening tombs and raising people from the dead, and then revive Jairus’ daughter (Matthew 9:18-26), the Widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7:11-17), and Lazarus (John 11:1-45)? In their own time, you try to have them killed. Maybe build them a monument later on.

Prophets, it turns out, are not without honor except in their own country, and in their own time. Ezekiel had an honored place among the prophets, but in his own time, according to tradition, he was tied up behind a horse and dragged across rough ground until he died. John the Baptist is a holy prophet, too. In his own time he declared, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” (John 1:29), and they threw him in prison, then beheaded him. Jesus raised Lazarus, and even the Pharisees said, “Look, the whole world has gone after Him” (John 12:19) and… well, you get the idea.

We are better at remembering prophets than following them. Better at building monuments than recognizing their voices among us in their own time.

Today people are starting to read the Bible more than they have in years – Bible sales today are double what they were in 2019. We are knee-deep in data about crises of loneliness, meaning, and mental health declines, especially among the young. We can get out in front of these things now, if we choose. Right now it is possible to hear the voice of the Lord saying, “I will put my Spirit in you, and you will live…. I will do it, says the Lord” (Ezekiel 37:14). People might consider us troublesome and dangerous, but at least the voice of the Lord would be heard.

Or we can build a monument, maybe four or five decades from now, when many who are now reading these words will be safely dead.

It is easy to build monuments to Abraham Lincoln, St. John Paul, Jesus and the prophets. All of them, however, would gladly have traded future monuments to their memory for more people paying attention in their own time. The “mystic chords of memory” (Lincoln’s first inaugural, 4 March 1861) are beautiful and comforting, but they are not as good or as powerful as the “better angels of our nature” (ibid.) paying attention to what God is saying right now.