In a homily Father Richard Rohr, OFM, describes the tension between priestly and prophetic tasks—both necessary for healthy religion:
There are two great strains of spiritual teachers in Judaism, and I think, if the truth is told, in all religions. There’s the priestly strain that holds the system together by repeating the tradition. The one we’re less familiar with is the prophetic strain, because that one hasn’t been quite as accepted. Prophets are critical of the very system that the priests maintain.
If we have both, we have a certain kind of wholeness or integrity. If we just have priests, we keep repeating the party line and everything is about loyalty, conformity, and following the rules—and that looks like religion. But if we have the priest and the prophet, we have a system constantly refining itself and correcting itself from within. Those two strains very seldom come together. We see it in Moses, who both gathers Israel, and yet is the most critical of his own people. We see it again in Jesus, who loves his people and his Jewish religion, but is lethally critical of hypocrisy and illusion and deceit (see Matthew 23; Luke 11:37–12:3).
Choctaw elder and Episcopal bishop Steven Charleston considers how Jesus invited others to share in his prophetic vision:
Jesus … saw a vision that became an invitation for people to claim a new identity, to enter into a new sense of community.… Jesus offered the promise of justice, healing, and redemption.… Jesus became the prophetic teacher of a spiritual renewal for the poor and the oppressed…. Jesus was more than just the recipient of a vision or the messenger of a vision. What sets Jesus apart is that he brought the elements of his vision quest together in a way that no one else had ever done….
“This is my body,” he told them. “This is my blood.” For him, the culmination of his vision was not just the messiahship of believing in him as a prophet. Through the Eucharist, Jesus was not just offering people a chance to see his vision, but to become a part of it by becoming a part of him.
Richard honors the role of prophets in religious systems:
The only way evil can succeed is to disguise itself as good. And one of the best disguises for evil is religion. Someone can be racist, be against the poor, hate immigrants, and be totally concerned about making money and being a materialist but still go to church each Sunday and be “justified” in the eyes of religion.
Those are the things that prophets point out, so prophets aren’t nearly as popular as priests. Priests keep repeating the party line, but prophets do both: they put together the best of the conservative with the best of the liberal, to use contemporary language. They honor the tradition, and they also say what’s phony about the tradition. That’s what fully spiritually mature people can do.
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation – Monday, October 13, 2025
First Thoughts 