Some of the most colourful stories in the Old Testament revolve around the prophet Elijah and his relationship with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. We tend to read the stories in isolation, and do not always see how they hang together.
Jezebel was what Israel considered a foreign bride. She was from Tyre, in modern Lebanon, and worshipped the pagan God Ba’al. Ahab was a weak king, and allowed her to make Ba’al worship the official religion of Israel. This met with very stiff resistance, for the God of Israel is, for the Jews, the only and only God. Ba’al was God of fertility, of rain and new birth. God therefore challenges Ba’al at his strength, and through Elijah prophesies a three-and-a-half-year drought.
The story ends with Elijah and the prophets of Ba’al contesting on the top of Mount Carmel to end the drought through their sacrifices. The prophets of Ba’al dance and chant and gash themselves all day around their altar, but nothing happens. Then Elijah rebuilds the broken-down altar of God, places wood and the sacrificed bull upon it and has water poured over it as a sign of his prayer for rain. He then offers a quiet, simple prayer, upon which lightning from heaven strikes and consumes everything on the altar. The people of Israel are convinced by this that God is the true god, and chant “Elijah! Elijah!” over and over – which means “The Lord is my God!” The drought is broken; rain pours from the heavens. Elijah, the true and faithful prophet, has been God’s instrument in breaking it.
Today’s First Reading, in which Elijah raises back to life the dead son of the widow who has been looking after him, is part of this cycle of stories. Ironically, the widow is of the same nation as Queen Jezebel, whose promotion of Ba’al worship has led to the drought in the first place.
There are two vital lessons in these stories for us. The first is that God is the only true God, and that we who have been privileged by his call to serve and worship him must, like Elijah, be faithful to him with all that is within us. God gave Elijah all that he needed to carry out his task against a cruel and brutal king and queen. In the same way, whatever he calls us to do, he will always provide what we need for the task, even if it seems daunting and impossible. In the words of the Angel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin, “All things are possible to God.”
The second is that, if we are not prepared to carry out the mission to which God calls us, then he will allow others to do what we should be doing, as he did with the foreign widow who cared for Elijah. It was not the Catholic Church that brought the thugs of uptown New York to Christ, but a solitary evangelical preacher called David Wilkerson, whose story is related in The Cross and the Switchblade. There are many other examples. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, it is true, did similar work, hauling out the unwanted poor from gutters and behind dustbins and giving them life, hope and dignity.
But what are we doing to witness to the Good News of Jesus Christ? All around us are people hungry for God, longing to hear his word. In the everyday world in which we live, what are we doing to bring them closer to God? God calls us to this, and we must respond if we are not to become less and less relevant to God’s mission for us to win the world for Jesus Christ. These are deep and important matters. We need to ponder them, and then to engage fully in the mission which God has given each one of us.
Fr Phillip
