True vs. False Prophets, Righteous vs. Self-righteous Anger

This homily was delivered at the Church of the Gesu, Ateneo de Manila University, on 28 June 2026.

It has been a heartbreaking couple of weeks for us here at the Ateneo community. The death of our two student-athletes, Rene and Divine, in that tragic incident in Aurora continues to wound and haunt us. When young lives are cut terribly short, the pain is agonizing, especially for their families and loved ones. Understandably, we look for answers. We demand them—desperately. We want to make sense of the senseless.

It’s fascinating how today’s Gospel from Matthew speaks directly into this exact moment. Jesus tells us: “Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward. Whoever receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward.”

Notice the phrasing. Our Lord doesn’t say to welcome anyone who simply claims to be a prophet. He says we must receive a prophet because he is a prophet. In other words, the burden is on us to recognize true prophecy and true righteousness, and to welcome them when they show up.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to do that today. Just scroll through your social media feeds. There is certainly no shortage of people playing the prophet or posturing as righteous men and women in the middle of the firestorm facing our university. So, how can we tell which voices to welcome, as our Lord commands, and which ones to tune out and reject? How do we distinguish the righteous wrath of a true prophet from the self-righteous anger of the mob?

I think the first step is to understand the anatomy of anger. The prophets of the Bible were, of course, known for their holy wrath, their righteous anger—a searing, powerful emotional response to injustice or moral violation. It was the fury that consumed Elijah who battled 450 priests of the false god Baal on Mount Carmel. It was the anger that drove our Lord to overturn the moneychangers’ tables and to drive them away from the Temple of Jerusalem.

But here is the difference: True righteous anger is always rooted in love. It is directed entirely toward truth, justice, and healing. True prophets don’t want to burn the temple down; they want to purify it. In our current context, righteous anger is the voice that demands rigorous honesty and unshrinking accountability from our university.  It is the necessary, painful voice that demands that we concretize our commitment to safety through real, systemic reform, rather than just speaking in platitudes. As a community , we need the humility to receive this prophetic anger, to listen to it, to learn from it.

Self-righteous anger, on the other hand, is an entirely different creature. It is performative. It doesn’t seek accountability as much as it seeks an audience. Self-righteous anger is what happens when grief curdles into a mob mentality that seems to actually revel in the controversy. It uses a heartbreaking tragedy not to secure justice for the victims, but to secure the moral high ground for the self. It is loud, it is arrogant, it is ugly, and it is ultimately self-serving.

For those of us who love the Ateneo, the temptation right now is to fall into two opposite extremes. The first is to adopt a fortress mentality, blindly defending our alma mater out of pride and refusing to acknowledge our faults and to learn from our shortcomings. The second extreme is to give in to the fashionable rage, typing out condemnations without offering any grace, nuance, or hope.

The Gospel warns us against both of these extremes. It invites us, instead, to be loving dissenters. True prophets in our community are those who love the Ateneo de Manila enough to speak hard, uncompromising truths to it. They think critically. They can—and must—dissent. But they do so as insiders who mourn with the community, who disagree out of a profound love for what our university is supposed to be, and who do so humbly—recognizing that in a broken world such as ours, no one among us has the sole franchise on righteousness.

“Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet…”

This week, perhaps our prayer should be a prayer for the grace to log off from the noise, and to resist the temptation of infecting others with the bloodthirsty rage of the online mob. Let us learn to discern righteous anger, which comes from God, from self-righteous anger, which can only come from the evil spirit. Let’s stop serving as the pawn of the evil spirit, unwitting agents of the spiritual desolation that is so pleasurable to spread. Exasperated by all the online vitriol, a friend couldn’t help asking the other day: “So, when did all these Ateneans turn into HATEneans?”

Dear friends, I think its time to make a shift: from finger-pointing to the more crucial—but also more painful—work of soul-searching. Let us not allow ourselves to be swayed by false prophets online, but let us also not be defensive when the true prophets among us hold up a mirror to our failures. Most importantly, let us continue to pray for the souls of the two young men we lost, and for their grieving families. May our search for truth and accountability be the most fitting tribute to their memory.