Friends, today, in Matthew’s account of the rejection of Jesus at Nazareth, Christ refers to himself as a prophet.

In the Old Testament tradition, the prophet is a religious visionary and truth-teller. The great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said that the prophet is someone who feels the feelings of God and then speaks out of that experience. He stubbornly reads the world through the lens of the word of God and speaks the divine truth. And this mission implies opposition, confrontation, and critique, since the keepers of worldly order are frequently looking through other lenses and listening to other words.

But Jesus is much more than one more prophet in a long line of prophets, one more speaker of the divine truth, one more reader of the divine word. Jesus is the Word made flesh; he is the Divine Truth in person.