You will stand before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them…do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say; but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit (cfr. Mk 13:11). The essence of Christianity is the encounter with Christ, who turns life upside down and makes it one hundred times richer in meaning, in texture, in enjoyment. All of reality assumes a profundity of meaning that is otherwise unimaginable, prevaded by the perfume of the eternal that sweeps away the limit of time and space.
Whoever is touched by this fact, which is both human and divine, is at the same time given a task and a responsibility: to testify before the world that this encounter is for all and introduces a new criterion for judging reality. Each person, according to ways and forms that are not decided by him, is called to be a prophet, according to what has already been announced in the Bible: your sons and your daughters will become prophets.
A prophet, in the Old Testament, was a man who was chosen to be the voice of God for His people. He had the task of recalling his own people to their connection with God and to respect for the covenant that He had established with them. He was a man among others, who God set aside for Himself so that he might be a mouthpiece of His sentiments toward the people, so that he could share in His preoccupations and make himself an echo of His love. Each of them had their own history and temperament, which varied greatly among them, as a proof that God calls whom He wants, without worrying about their merits or preferring one character or social condition over another.
The prophet could have been a humble pastor like Amos, an ambitious young man like Elisha, a solitary eccentric like John the Baptist, but perhaps no one had a personality as strong and complex as did Elijah. Contemptuous and irascible, faithful but at times indolent: in him coexisted many sides of a unified yet multifaceted humanity. His story, recounted in the BIble with extreme narrative wisdom, captures the reader. Like when he challenges, by himself, four hundred pagan prophets, deriding them, provoking them and killing them after having revealed to all their own falsity and that of their gods.
All of us are asked for the willingness to be a public witness of our faith
And yet, it is in the revelation that God makes of Himself, not in a powerful sign, but through a light breeze that Elijah finds the origin and the deep meaning of his witness. It is in this personal revelation of God that Elijah discovers the response to his own restlessness.
Prophetic as well was Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian farmer, beatified in 2007 under Benedict XVI, who refused to fight for the cause of Hitler and the Third Reich.
From being an impetuous and rebellious youngster, lover of fighting and women, Franz changed his life when he met Franziska, a bit younger than him. From their marriage came three children. It was rediscovering a life of faith, the gratitude for being forgiven and embraced, the certain belonging to the Church and to its magisterium that made this man of humble origins able to understand the incompatibility of Christian life and the adhesion to Nazism.
If the relationship with his wife and the certainty of being loved and sustained by her without condition made him firm and resolute even unto the sacrifice of martyrdom, it was above all his profound desire -so obvious in his letters- to conform himself to Christ and to follow Him that became the reason and ultimate foundation of his availability to the most radical form of testimony.
Every Christian is called to this prophetic vocation, even if each one is called according to modalities and conditions that differ according to each person’s history. All of us are asked for the willingness to be a public witness of our faith and we cannot excuse ourselves even when this brings with it the greatest sacrifice. With the awareness that the offering of oneself makes sense only as a response to a love that precedes us and with the certainty that the ultimate subject of this witness is not us but the Spirit that Christ gives to those who follow Him. This frees us from every fear born of our weakness, from our inadequacy, to correspond to the image evoked by the words of Franz: “What we want to see are Christians who are able to resist, in the midst of these shadows, with superior clarity, composite and surety, who oppose, with the most pure peace and serenity, the absence of peace and joy, egoism and hate; who are not so many reeds that bend here and there at the slightest breeze, who do not stop at looking at what the others or their friends are doing but who ask, ‘What does our faith teach us?’”.
