King Herod feared the people, for they regarded John the Baptist as a prophet. Being a prophet was not the way to an easy life. John lost his head. Jeremiah found this out when he heard the sentence: “This man deserves death.” A prophet almost by definition is going against the mainstream and that makes some people so uncomfortable that they react with violence. The big problem that a prophet has is that only subsequent events prove that his message was, in fact, from God. In Jeremiah’s time there were others claiming prophecy who declared that God told them to give the exact opposite message than the one Jeremiah was delivering. Since that is what the people wanted to hear they tended to agree with that message instead of the more challenging one of Jeremiah. When we hear messages about church, national policies, the environment, the economy that make us uncomfortable we should take notice.
