Lion Bait: June 30, 2019

Galatians 5:13-25
Psalm 16
2 Kings 2:1-14

When we think of prophets, we might think of the Big Three, the named books we encounter most frequently in worship and Sunday School: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We might think of the Book of the Twelve, the minor prophets, sometimes named, sometimes fictional. We might think of other prophets named in the histories that did not leave behind a text, people like Elijah and his student Elisha in today’s reading. But we almost always think of prophets in particularity, mostly singular. Ezekiel isn’t hanging with his homies breaking pots and having seizures. Prophecy is not thought of as a group activity.

This singular conception of the prophet is the result of tradition, our declining familiarity with our scriptures, and our mental tendency to flatten, to simplify. Individual prophets have a name, the groups do not. But Isaiah was not really just Isaiah, but an entire school of religious thought and prophecy that would produce new work in the prophet’s name for at least two centuries after the death of Isaiah Bin Amoz. Jeremiah was closely associated with a major Jewish reform in the decades before Jerusalem was conquered and destroyed by the Babylonians, a reform movement that would produce much of the Hebrew scripture, including the history we read today, and that would continue to expand the book written in the prophet’s name for at least another four centuries. And then there are the unnamed prophets, like those that seem to taunt Elisha in today’s reading, one group numbered in the text as fifty men. Our narrow definition of prophecy does not fit the textual and historical evidence.

My own journey to re-conceiving prophecy did not begin with an academic text, with a seminar at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, or even in the semester course I took in the Prophetic Literature with the Lutheran scholar Paul Hanson at Harvard. It began when I was reading a story from scripture, one I didn’t learn in Sunday School as a kid, one connected with Ahab and Jezebel, Elijah and Elisha. Hear the ancient tale:

At the command of the Lord a certain member of a company of prophets said to another, “Strike me!” But the man refused to strike him. Then he said to him, “Because you have not obeyed the voice of the Lord, as soon as you have left me, a lion will kill you.” And when he had left him, a lion met him and killed him. Then he found another man and said, “Strike me!” So the man hit him, striking and wounding him.

Then the prophet departed, and waited for the king along the road, disguising himself with a bandage over his eyes. As the king passed by, he cried to the king and said, “Your servant went out into the thick of the battle; then a soldier turned and brought a man to me, and said, ‘Guard this man; if he is missing, your life shall be given for his life, or else you shall pay a talent of silver.’ While your servant was busy here and there, he was gone.”

The king of Israel said to him, “So shall your judgment be; you yourself have decided it.”

Then the prophet quickly took the bandage away from his eyes. The king of Israel recognized him as one of the prophets. Then he said to the king, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Because you have let the man go whom I had devoted to destruction, therefore your life shall be for his life, and your people for his people.’”

The king of Israel set out toward home, resentful and sullen, and came to Samaria.

You would be forgiven if you are encountering this disturbing tale for the first time. It isn’t exactly a text we lift up in worship, this whole “getting eaten by a lion” thing, never mind that Ahab’s punishment is for not killing someone God told him to kill, just as the lion-bait prophet was punished for not punching someone.

I was intrigued by the ways the narrative forced me to rethink prophecy in the biblical age, a prophetic frat house if you will. I was stunned by the jarring and uncomfortable violence. I wondered how this story tied in to the assertion that Ahab was the worst of all of the kings of the Northern Kingdom. Was he the worst simply because Judaism after the Babylonian Exile was obsessed with racial purity, and Ahab had married outside of his race? Was it because Judaism after the Babylonian Exile was obsessed with monotheism, and Ahab and Jezebel were a reminder that not so very long ago, the Hebrews were syncretic and diverse in their beliefs?

Oh yeah, and the lion. ‘Cause who doesn’t like a good man-eating lion story, right?

Elijah is a man that Judaism holds in high regard. Jews still pour a cup for Elijah during Passover. He is important enough in the Hebrew tradition for the three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, all good Jews, to encounter him as one of the three people, along with Jesus and Moses, on the mountain at the Transfiguration. In fact, in today’s story, Elijah parts the waters like Moses, and on the cross, it is to Elijah that the onlookers mistakenly believe Jesus cries.

Elijah and his conflict with Ahab are central to the history contained in 1st and 2nd Kings, though Elijah doesn’t always come off looking so good either, despite being the hero. One of the great gifts of biblical literature is that it gives us characters that feel real, people we might experience in our own lives, flawed leaders and misguided decisions.

At times Elijah lashes out and pouts. He orders a mass murder after he defeats Jezebel’s prophets of Baal. And here he is, coming to the end of his life, and he is going to be afforded the opportunity to ascend into heaven without experiencing bodily death…. kind of a big deal, something that only happens one other time in the Hebrew scriptures. Even Jesus has to endure death.

Elijah’s closest follower, his constant companion, is with him, and knows that they are nearing the end, yet Elisha insists on the journey, insists on the simple ministry of presence. Are those unnamed prophets informing Elisha that his master is going away, telling, taunting? We don’t have enough information to really know, though prophets are usually rough around the edges, and there is that whole lion’s hors d’oeuvres thing.

Elisha’s response is testy, suggesting that maybe we are to read it as taunting. It would not be the first time or last time that religious people come off as jerks, taunting those who are hurting. If you are the Son of God, come down from that cross, they said.

“Be silent!,” Elisha tells them. He must see this through, though his heart is breaking. Be silent, as Jesus was silent before Pontius Pilate, for the damage of whisper campaigns, gossip and lies, had been done. Be silent, because words were not going to help at that point, not for Elijah, who had been faithful, not for Jesus. Chariot or cross, the journey had to be made.

Elisha is unsure of himself, of his ability to lead after Elijah is gone. How do you follow after such a man, looming so big in the minds of the community? Asked what gifts he wants, he responds “a double share of your spirit.” Elisha knows that a single share won’t be enough, he is going to need twice as much to be an effective prophet.

There is this miracle, a chariot and horses all of fire, but there is all of this grief too, for there is always an “after.”

In 1961, a slim volume on grief was published under the name N.W. Clerk. No such person existed. The author of “A Grief Observed” was the greatest Christian writer of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, known as Jack to his friends. The book is raw, human, for Lewis had fallen in love late in life, married Joy Davidman when she had already been diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. He wrote:

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

This is not happy-clappy maudlin religion. This is religion meets real life. This is gone like Elijah, but not leaving behind a mantle. There is this body, this thing that is at once the one we loved and not at all the one we loved, a terrible reminder. I want to know that someone like Lewis struggles, for I struggle everyday.

Later in the text, Lewis would write:

…grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

We can believe that for God death is not a thing. We can believe in mysteries beyond our experience and comprehension. We can believe in quantum entanglement and even the idea that the followers of Jesus experienced him as being real and present for them after they had seen him wrongly executed as the result of collusion between government and religion. We can believe all of those things, and I do. But Jack Lewis believed those things too,, shared that belief powerfully with millions, still guides Christians to this day, and his grief was real, his wounds ink upon the page.

Be silent. Your words are not helping. Your taunting is not helping. I know what is coming. I am not ready. How will I go on?

He picked up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. He took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and struck the water, saying, “Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” When he had struck the water, the water was parted to the one side and to the other, and Elisha went over.

All he has left is this mantle. Grief and anger and doubt well up in him. ‘Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?”

It is a question we all have asked.

“When he had struck the water, the water was parted.”

God was there. God had been there the whole time.

And Elisha went over. He went over and continued to serve the Lord as a prophet. Next week’s readings include the healing of Naaman, the Aramean general. Elisha doesn’t even bother to come out and see him, simply sends instructions for Naaman to bathe in the river, to the general’s dismay. Maybe that double portion worked after all…

God was there the whole time. In the midst of the taunting, the grief, the fire, God was there and had always been there.

God has been here the whole time. May we pick up the mantle and continue our journeys.

Amen.