Saturday, June 15, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Lame duck Elijah meets successor Elisha
Elijah came upon Elisha plowing with twelve yoke of oxen.
Not two presidents, but two prophets, and this exchange of power took place far from any spotlight. After thirty years as prophet, Elijah put his cloak on the 20 year old Elisha, whom he found plowing in his father’s field. Elisha’s anointing launched six years with Elijah, before Elisha continued on his own for 64 more years.
Elisha left the oxen and ran after Elijah. “Please let me kiss my father and mother goodbye.” Elijah answered, “Go back!”
Much is made by scholars of Jesus’ contrasting command to an earnest follower, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God” (Luke 9). Elijah, stern and stalwart, lightened up for at least a moment.
Elisha took a yoke of oxen, slaughtered them, used the plowing equipment for fuel to boil their flesh, and gave it to his people to eat.
Perhaps his father had another plow. There were 11 yoke of oxen left after Elisha’s farewell gesture. The land would continue to bear fruit, and Elisha would follow Elijah into God’s service, and bear much fruit himself.
Then he left and followed Elijah as his attendant.
Chapter 20 of 1st Kings follows the military history of King Ahab, but Elijah and Elisha are not mentioned. Other prophets (some of the 100 who came out of hiding in Obadiah’s caves?) spoke up in various ways. Ahab’s victory against the Syrians was short-lived – by the end of the chapter a prophet warned Ahab of his own impending death.
It is your life for his life, your people for his people. Sullen and angry, the king of Israel went to his palace in Samaria.
Our presidents become sullen and angry as well, although often they keep that to themselves.  I don’t think people, leaders or followers, have changed that much over the centuries. The two E-prophets lived during the days of Assyrian Empire. We see the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Spanish, the English, at last the Americans following in Assyrian footsteps. We watch their empires rise and fall – rise in strength and glory and fall slowly in weakness, denial and shame.
On what many authors have called the ship of fools, a small porthole-sized window in time is reserved for each of us to watch.
Take your place on the Great Mandala,
As it moves through your brief moment of time …
We are free now, we can kill now,
We can hate now, now we can end the world
We’re not guilty, he was crazy
And it’s been going on for ten thousand years!
That song haunts me, child as I am of the 1960’s and 70’s, under 30, pushing back on the apparently impersonal and ignorant US government decisions to send its sons, often without their permission, off to fight in the Vietnamese Civil War.
And I think of Elijah and Elisha, battling themselves against their own king and queen, against Assyrian nabobs and muck-a-mucks, always seeking solace and direction from Yahweh, who sometimes spoke the strangest things at inopportune times, but who sought his prophets’ obedience in all of that.
Jesus spoke well of God’s prophets. And he insisted that his listeners recognize that God always directs our lives in love, and nothing else but love.
Do not swear anything, not by heaven, for it is God’s throne, not by the earth, for it is his footstool, nor by Jerusalem, for it the city of the great King.
All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small. All things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.
Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black. Just let your “yes” mean “yes.” And your “no” mean no.”
(1 Kings 19, Psalm 16, Psalm 119, Matthew 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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