The way of imagination

  Text: Jeremiah 1.1-19; 20.7-9      What the hell is a prophet?   Perhaps what most often comes to our mind when we hear this word is a somewhat shadowy figure on the fringes of the Bible’s narrative, as well as on the margins of our consciousness.   To put it more frankly, prophets often strike us as a rag-tag bunch of inane babblers, dreamers who proffered nightmarish scenarios of fire-and-brimstone and the end-of-the-world.   Or again, perhaps we think of the biblical prophets as hybrid creatures – a cross between, on the one hand, those who stand on street corners with signs which read “The end is near” and, on the other, puritanical priests wagging their fingers at every conceivable pleasure one may be inclined to indulge in.   An urgent question arises – is this popular (mis)conception of the prophets justified by anything in the text of the prophetic books of the Bible themselves?      What is a prophet according to Scripture?   At the most fundamental level, biblical proph