Don't Feed the Messenger!

I have been thinking recently about what I consider to be one of the oddest chapters in the Bible. 1 Kings 13 gives us a narrative of the prophet who condemns Jeroboam, and is then deceived by another older prophet on his way home so that he falls under God’s judgment and is killed by a lion.

Leaving to one side the issue of 'fairness' (which will be dealt with in the following post), the passage calls up the importance of the message and the messenger and how the two are linked in a fairly vivid way. We see this in a few ways.

The first is in the odd instructions God gives to the prophet. He is not allowed to eat or drink on his way home. We could come up with all kinds of reasons why this might be the case, and sometimes God gives instructions to prophets which have a symbolic meaning. But in this case simply don’t know and we’d only be guessing. The narrative goes out of its way to show us (through repetition) that this is a clear, explicit command given by God and understood by the prophet.
And it demonstrates in a concrete way that the prophet belongs to God. He not only brings God’s message, but he has no independent existence apart from God. God literally controls his life: what he will say, to whom, and even when he will eat and drink. The prophet does not say his two cents worth and then go back to being a private citizen. He can’t divorce himself from his job or from his message. He is the prophet, not just the guy who sometimes prophecies.

The second thing is that others relate to him on the basis of his message. The older prophet wants him to come back with him because of his message, not because he wants to spend quality time with him as a person. We see this when he finally concedes that his prophecy was genuine in light of the younger prophet’s death. The (ironic, offensive and pathetic) outpouring of grief he has on the death of the younger prophet comes about only after he is convinced that this is a genuine prophet: he doesn’t grieve for the prophet as a man he had tea with, but as a prophet.

The young prophet dies because he is a prophet. God holds him accountable to his word in a public way because he is a prophet; the older prophet deceives him because he is a prophet.

It’s a great passage for bringing home the point that God’s word is not a neutral thing. It isn’t like any other word, and this raises a variety of issues. Here, one of the key issues is that the relationship between the messenger of God’s word and the word or message are strongly linked. The younger prophet doesn’t stop being a prophet – even his bones are the bones of a prophet (and so come to have value to the older prophet).

We see this most clearly in Jesus, who is both the great and final message and the last and ultimate messenger. The two ‘roles’ cannot be cut off from one another, effectively tying who he is with what he does and demonstrating his relationship with God and with humanity. You can only relate to Jesus on the basis of what you think of his message, because he is the messenger. Being messenger for Jesus meant dying for our sins and rising again and that is precisely the core of the message he brings. The Lord Jesus is not a private citizen but one who puts aside any private preference he might have and in order to welcome us to God embodies the message even as through his Spirit he speaks the message of forgiveness of sins through his cross. It’s no great surprise that the writer of Hebrews contrasts Jesus first with ‘messengers’ (angels) in Hebrews 1 as he shows that Jesus is superior, not only in bringing God’s message but in being the message. In Jesus, messenger and message come together.

And the warning for us lies in how we treat the messenger and his message. We can’t pretend to accept the message and deny the messenger; we can’t pretend to like the messenger and reject the message. The two are intertwined. This pushes us into understanding ourselves as always under the message or word in our relationship with Jesus, striving for an attitude of submission to him, by being ruled by his word through his Spirit.