Canter Bridge

The funerals of judgmental prophets often attract applause. Their death is good news. Their stillness means we can get back to what we were about. The shadow of doubt regarding their potential credibility is lost in normalcy’s reassuring brightness.

It is this way with prophets. They are mortal. They bother us for a time, then move on. Some become irrelevant, others discredit themselves and their message, still others overreach and become absurd. Some of them we kill. It seems continuity’s only option.

Revelation eleven tracks heavily in the symbolism of martyred prophets, two of them, their bodies eventually thrown untended into the streets as though such disregard is the purest kind of rejection. Let the dogs eat them, our hands are busy about other, self-referential, more hygienic tasks:

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. But after the three and a half days, the breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and those who saw them were terrified. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, ‘Come up here!’ And they went up to heaven in a cloud while their enemies watched them.

Yet the Bible’s divine Lover of Reversals often makes his scariest points by way of dead prophets. Indeed, in this apocalyptic work, he wakes them from their death-sleep, chases away the flies, and brings them to himself.

The silence in the wake of a prophet’s vindication represents one of humanity’s deepest and most shattering moments.

Terrible things follows. Sometimes an earthquake.