For some time, the Christian Church has talked about itself as “the mystical body of Christ.” That is a rich archetype to explore and to play out. But I think it’s time to update its self-definition and propose that its fuller vocation is to be a mystical/prophetic body of Christ.
In my first book on spirituality, I define prayer as “a radical response to life” and I stand by that definition today, 54 years later.
In that book, I lay out the adult radical response to life being two-fold: 1. Mysticism, and 2. Prophecy. We are all called to be mystics or lovers of life who respond to life with a deep Yes. And we are all called to be prophets who respond to injustice and other forces that endanger life with a deep No. Our deep Yes’s and deep No’s constitute our radical (i.e. root or deep) response to life.
I also propose in the Postscript called “The Three Bears” that together a new understanding of Trinity emerges: The Yes (the Creator Father/Mother or Source of life); the No (from the Son who took on the empire and its values and paid a steep price for it); and the sending of the Spirit for generations to come, who would inspire others to carry on the work of Spirit, Life and protest.
Rabbi Heschel, in his iconic book The Prophets, gets to the essence of the prophetic tradition in Israel when he summarizes the primary work of the prophets as interfering. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, Jesus and other prophets certainly did interfere, and did so with a fierce and often playful moral imagination employed to wake people up.
Of course, in today’s MAGA world, the notion of waking people up has come to mean the worst of all things: Being “woke.” Being awakened has become a mortal sin under the rule of MAGA. Which is one more reason MAGA can be rightly categorized as antichrist.
This week’s news seems especially laden with evil goings-on that beckon our interference. It’s hard to know where to begin.
There is the emergence of the first trillionaire in human history who has achieved this status principally through the largesse of the American government and American people whose taxes uphold the government. Over the years, government money supported his Tesla Company in order to promote less gas-guzzling transportation that results in polluted air and climate change with all its fierce consequences.
The largesse of the American government and taxpayers has also made Space X possible. In 2018 Musk paid zero in federal taxes. He has been called the “most stingy” of all billionaires.
But this first-of-all-trillionaires now being celebrated by Wall Street is the same person who literally took a chainsaw to many government programs that serve the most needy people of the world. For example, he single-handedly eliminated humanitarian aid, that will lead to the needless deaths of 4.5 million of the poorest children in the world in the next 4 years.
As Bill Gates, who is no financial slouch himself put it, The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one. I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money.*
He is currently fomenting racist pogroms in Ireland. Thus the story of a trillionaire’s “success” includes many other stories that merit shouting about. Morality and its opposite are part of the stakes in the unbridled capitalism of our time. The system must be updated. It is the prophetic task of all citizens—and certainly all who claim to stand with Jesus—to call this out.
To be continued.
* Matt Lavietes, “Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of killing poor children by cutting foreign aid and says he’s giving away his wealth,” NBC News, May 8, 2026.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE. (Please note, we had technical difficulties with the closed captioning this week, so if you usually watch the video with closed captions, please follow along with the transcript instead.)
Banner Image: Jesus Preaches in a Ship. Art by James Tissot (1836-1902). Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
What are your thoughts about this moment in history when trillionaires appear? And of recognizing the Christian community as both the mystical and prophetic body of Christ?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Prayer: A Radical Response To Life.
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance.
Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality.
Trump and the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ.
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation.
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4 thoughts on “A Time For Interference from the Mystical/Prophetic Body of Christ”
As I see it, the current eruption of billionaires—under the leadership of the chainsaw wielder in chief—is the growth of a METAstasis in the ailing socioeconomic body of humankind, a sure sign that the unsustainable kingdom of greed is on a path to a dramatic demise. The scale of our Earth’s resources overdraft combined with our global deafness to the cry of the Earth is such that when the industrial era bubble pops, the COVID pandemic will retrospectively seem like a picnic. “To be restored, our sickness must grow worse”: the cosmic body of Christ may arise as the regrowth of humanity after the hard lessons of the Anthropocene have been integrated. This cannot happen in a generation or two: a few centuries of the new Dark Ages that have begun are a drop in the ocean of geological and cosmic time. Composting, germination and maturing are slow processes. As this global evolutionary process from which there is no escape unfolds, it remains entirely up to each of us to partake in the mystical and prophetic body of Christ by heeding Matthew 18:20: “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” I consider this DM as an example of such gatherings and I am grateful for it.
I agree with everything you have said, Daniel, and yes, “This cannot happen in a generation or two.” I hope we are somehow wrong. It continues to amaze me that so many of my progressive friends still think that the mid-terms will change things. First, I see no way that the U.S. will have a fair election that will put Dems back in power. The Republicans are doing every unDemocratic thing they can to see that they stay in power, and they will continue to do so. Citizens will put Dems back in power IF there is a fair election, but there will not be. (I hope I am proven wrong.) There’s no need to send Dems money. They will win if it’s fair. If there’s a chance to turn things around soon, it will be by sending money to fair-elections groups, not people running for office. But I’m off topic. I just toured the Palace of Knossos on Crete, and I just watched the entire PBS documentary The American Revolition. It’s so easy to see how high civilizations, like the Minoan, can fall. The U.S. has engaged in many, many sins even while a large portion of its citizenry has indeed followed our highest ideals. Is our civilization any more worthy of continuance than so many failed civilizations? I hate to say it, but I am not sure.
It seems like the growth of spiritually unhealthy and one sided patriarchy in American history the last five hundred years, beginning with the genocide of indigenous native Americans and later slavery, has reached its dangerous culmination with the MAGA movement, the authoritarian Trump regime, his sycophant Republicans and greedy billionaire supporters, and our materialistic capitalist culture. Modern prophets like Matthew Fox, especially his warnings of this Antichrist movement summarized in his small but powerful spiritual book, “Trump and the MAGA Movement as the Anti-Christ” and today’s DM, continue to warn and inspire us Americans (and Humanity) on our personal and communal spiritual journeys to be alert, resistant, and strengthened by God’s Spirit of Love~Light~Life — Truth, Peace, Justice, Healing, Transformation, Freedom, Creativity Joy, Compassion… within and among Us and Our subtle nonphysical spiritual collaborators (Incarnational Spirituality; lorian.org). As spiritual warriors with Faith We can continue working together as the Body of Christ to save our Sacred Mother Earth, and Our human evolution along with Our living sacred evolving Cosmos….
Capitalism has reached peak velocity. You thought the upward wealth transfer already exceeded the Gilded Age? Musk’s newly-minted trillionaire status now kicks-off a race that will make the nuclear arms proliferation of the Cold War look like collecting Lego sets. Because that’s how those people think. I hate to use the phrase “those people,” but in this case, it’s justified. People of the Epstein class are locked in a perpetual competition to impress each other and gain the bragging rights to Do, Have, or Be …. the First, the Most, the Only, of anything. And they don’t know when to stop. They don’t know when enough is enough. They feel like they *can’t* stop, lest they lose the respect of their peers. Must be an awfully anxious way to live.