Wait a Minute. Bad Bunny Is Doing Ancient Prophet Stuff.

Here's what happened on Sunday.

A former altar boy and church choir kid from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico

walked onto the biggest stage in American entertainment

and turned it into a sugar cane field.

Then he walked through that field past old men playing dominoes,

past a piragua cart with flags from across the Americas on every syrup bottle,

past kids sleeping on chairs at a party

because that's what kids do at Caribbean gatherings when the adults won't stop dancing.

He wore a jersey with OCASIO on the back and the number 64.

His mother's birth year and her family name.

He performed entirely in Spanish.

He brought out Ricky Martin to sing a song

comparing Puerto Rico's colonization to what happened to Hawaii.

His dancers climbed electric poles and the poles sparked,

because Puerto Rico suffered the longest blackout

in American history after Hurricane Maria and the government still hasn't fixed the grid.

A couple got married onstage. Lady Gaga wore Puerto Rico's national flower.

At the end, he said "God bless America"

and then named every country in the Americas from Chile to Canada,

because America is not a synonym for the United States.

And the President of the United States, watching from his golf club,

posted that it was one of the worst halftime shows ever

and that nobody could understand what the guy was saying.

I was watching this and something clicked.

I know this guy. Not personally.

But I've seen this before. I've been reading it for years.

Bad Bunny is doing prophet stuff.

The Pattern

I don't mean "prophet" the way most people use it. Not predicting the future. Not visions. Not claiming divine authority. I mean prophet the way the Hebrew Bible means it: a person who stands in front of a community and says this is what's happening to us and this is where God is moving in it.

The Hebrew prophets had a very specific job description, and it wasn't fortune-telling. It was witness. They named what the powerful were doing to the vulnerable. They did it in public. They did it with poetry and symbol and performance. And they did it while being told to shut up.

Amos was a shepherd who showed up at the royal shrine and told the king's priest that God was going to judge Israel for exploiting the poor. The priest told him to go prophesy somewhere else. Amos said: I'm not even a professional prophet. I'm a farmer. God told me to come say this. So here I am.

Jeremiah bought a clay pot, walked to the valley outside Jerusalem, smashed it in front of the city elders, and said: this is what God is going to do to this city because of what you've done to its people. Performance art. Symbolic action. Nobody misunderstood what the broken pot meant. That was the point.

Ezekiel lay on his side for over a year. He cooked food over dung. He shaved his head and burned a third of the hair, scattered a third in the wind, and struck a third with a sword. Each gesture meant something specific about what was coming and why. He was a living theater piece. The body was the medium.

Isaiah walked around naked for three years as a sign against the nations. The text says God told him to. Whether or not you take that literally, the tradition preserved it. The tradition thought it was important enough to write down that God's messenger stripped in public and that the stripping meant something.

All of these have something in common. The prophet takes the body into public space, performs an action that the audience cannot ignore, and the action itself carries the message. It's not an argument. It's not a lecture. It's a demonstration. The medium is the body, the stage is the public square, and the message is: look at what's happening to us.

The Sugar Cane

Bad Bunny opened his halftime show in a sugar cane field. That's not a set decoration. That's a four-hundred-year wound.

Sugar cane plantations were the economic engine of Caribbean colonialism. The Taíno people were worked to near-extinction on them first, under Spanish colonial rule. Then enslaved Africans were brought in to replace them. Puerto Rico didn't abolish slavery until 1873, and after the United States took over in 1898, American sugar companies bought up the land and kept profiting from Puerto Rican labor. The workers in the halftime show wore all-white clothes and pava hats. The jíbaro. The rural farmer who's been doing the work for centuries while the profits go somewhere else.

So when Bad Bunny walked through that field on the most-watched broadcast in America, he wasn't performing nostalgia. He was saying: this is who we are. This is what was done to us. And we're still here. We're still cutting the cane. Except now the whole world is watching.

Jeremiah's pot. Ezekiel's hair. Isaiah's nakedness. Bad Bunny's sugar cane.

The prophet takes a symbol the community already knows, loaded and painful, and puts it where everyone has to see it.

The Electric Poles

Then there was "El Apagón." The Blackout.

While the song played, dancers climbed electric poles that sparked and exploded. After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico lost power for nearly a year. The longest blackout in American history. The grid was already failing before the hurricane because of decades of neglect, and the federal response was so inadequate that ordinary Puerto Ricans started climbing the poles themselves, teaching each other basic electrical skills, reconnecting their own neighborhoods because nobody was coming to do it for them.

Bad Bunny put that image on the Super Bowl stage. Citizens climbing poles because their government won't keep the lights on.

Amos would recognize this immediately. The prophet stands up and says: the powerful took what belonged to the people, the people are suffering, and the people are fixing it themselves because nobody with power will. That's the entire book of Amos in a reggaetón track.

The Language

He performed entirely in Spanish.

The President's complaint, "nobody understands a word this guy is saying," is, honestly, a gift to the analysis, because it's the exact thing that gets said to prophets. Go prophesy somewhere else, Amos. We don't want to hear this language here.

But think about this for a second. Approximately 42 million people in the United States speak Spanish at home. Puerto Ricans are American citizens. They've been American citizens since 1917. They can't vote for president, but they can be drafted. They pay federal taxes. They die in American wars. And the President of the United States watched one of them sing in his own language on the biggest stage in the country and said: I can't understand him.

The prophets spoke in the language of the people, not the language of the court. That was part of the offense. They didn't translate themselves for the powerful. They spoke to the community in the community's language, in public, where the powerful could hear it even if they didn't want to.

Bad Bunny didn't translate himself. The most-streamed artist on the planet performed entirely in his language, and if you didn't speak it, you were the visitor. Not him. The stadium was his sanctuary for thirteen minutes and the liturgy was in Spanish.

The Flag

Bad Bunny carried the Puerto Rican flag in a specific shade of light blue. Not the darker blue used by pro-statehood supporters. The light blue of the independence movement.

On the biggest possible American stage, with a hundred million people watching, he picked up the flag of Puerto Rican independence and held it up.

There was a time when displaying the Puerto Rican flag in the United States was illegal. People were killed for carrying it. The fact that he can wave it now is not evidence that the struggle is over. It's evidence that people fought for the right to wave it and won that much at least. And Bad Bunny's generation is making sure nobody forgets.

When prophets carry objects (Jeremiah's yoke, Ezekiel's scroll) the object means what words alone can't carry. The flag is the object. It's the declaration. And it doesn't need a translator.

"God Bless America"

At the end of the show, Bad Bunny said three words in English. "God bless America." And then he named countries. Chile. Argentina. Uruguay. Paraguay. Bolivia. Peru. Ecuador. Brazil. Moving north through Central America. Mexico. The United States. Canada. Puerto Rico last.

America is two continents. The United States is one country on those continents. When North Americans say "America" and mean only themselves, they are doing, theologically speaking, exactly what the prophets warned against. They are mistaking their nation for the whole of God's concern. They are making the chosen people very, very small.

Bad Bunny corrected this. With a geography lesson. Delivered as a benediction.

God bless America. All of it. Every country. Every flag. Together.

That's prophetic speech. It takes a familiar phrase, one that's been domesticated, turned into a political slogan, emptied of its original scope, and restores it. God bless America. Ok. Here's America.

The Wedding

A couple got married onstage during the halftime show. An actual wedding. During a song about dancing.

I keep thinking about this. In the middle of a prophetic performance, colonial history, political critique, cultural testimony, he made room for two people to get married. In front of a hundred million witnesses.

The prophets did this too. Hosea married Gomer as a prophetic act. Jeremiah was told not to marry as a prophetic act. Marriage in the prophetic tradition isn't private. It's a sign. It means something about the relationship between God and the community.

Bad Bunny put a wedding in the middle of his national address. In the middle of the sugar cane and the electric poles and the independence flag. He put love there. Not as a break from the politics. As the center of it.

"The only thing more powerful than hate is love." That was on the screen. Projected to a hundred million people during a halftime show that the President called terrible because he couldn't understand the language.

Singing to the Choir

Bad Bunny is deeply formed in liturgical theology.

Bad Bunny sang in a church choir as a kid. He was an altar server at Most Holy Trinity Parish in Vega Baja. His mom teaches catechism there. She prays for him. His grandmother and his aunt pray for him. He's said publicly that he doesn't pray himself, but he knows they do.

He said in an interview that God is everywhere, so why does he need to go to church.

I've heard that question from a lot of people. Usually, theologians treat it as a problem to be solved. A falling-away. A pastoral concern.

But what if it's not a falling-away? What if the kid who sang in the choir and served at the altar absorbed something real about witness, about community, about using your voice for people who are being crushed, and then went and did it at a scale the church could never reach?

What if the choir never stopped? What if it just moved to a bigger room?

Because when I watched him walk through that sugar cane field with OCASIO on his back,

naming his mother by her birth year,

and then climb an electric pole while a hundred million people watched,

and then name every country in the Americas and say God bless all of it —

I wasn't watching a pop star.

Well, I was.

But also,

we were witnessing a liturgical theologian; a prophet.

Hope Hilton, MDiv · noharmscripture.com