FINDINGS II
Proper 5 - C - June 6, 2010
I Kings 17: 8-16 and Luke 7: 11-17
 By Harry T. Cook
5/31/10
RUBRIC
Eating and healing -- both verb forms in this case -- are
characteristic of the activities of early apostolic Christianity. They are
featured in Luke 10: 1-12, the mission of the 70 who are to "go to every town"
where they are to take room and board with those whose maladies they are to
heal. The two activities are joined in the narrative about Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, which is, in
turn, linked by the lectionary to Luke 7: 11-17 wherein yet another healing
narrative involving a widow's son.
WORKSHOP
Luke sets the story in a lower Galilean village called
"Nain," which may be the contemporary "Nein," about five miles
southeast of Nazareth and 25 from Capernaum. Nain (or Nein) rates no other
mention in canonical Hebrew or Christian scripture.
There are sites-- junctions of old roads in what were the
Confederate States of America -- that are remembered solely for decisive
battles fought at them. Otherwise no one would have bothered to name them. What
is said to have occurred at Nain/Nein gives the place its textual fame. It was
at the gate of that place that Luke depicts Jesus encountering a funeral
procession. The deceased is said to be a widowed mother's only son. No one asks
anything of Jesus, but, Luke says, he was moved with compassion ("esplagchnisthā"
- a gut-level wrenching of emotion) and pleads with the woman not to cry. He
says, "Young man, I say to you, 'Be roused from sleep.' " It is a faint echo of the
elohim speaking light into being.
The scene presages the later narrative in John's gospel of
the raising of Lazarus. In this latter case, there is no doubt that John means
the reader to understand that Lazarus was dead -- hence the reference to the
olfactory evidence. In any event, the widow's son, supposed to be dead, "sat up
and began to speak."
That the speech is depicted as the first true sign of
re-animation says plenty. It connects speaking with what will come to be known
as "resurrection." Even though Luke does not give the re-animated man actual
words to speak, you can bet that Luke meant for those whom he depicts as
witnessing the event to speak of it far and wide -- just as gospel communities,
post-70 C.E., spread the word of Jesus' "resurrection" (however it was
considered to be true). It was what distinguished their brand of Judaism from
most synagogue or continuing post-Temple Judaism.
And to be sure, we read at 7:17 that word of the event did spread
throughout Judea and environs, just as the "resurrection" story did by other
means in the church's later formative years. And in the very next verse it is
said, "The disciples of John (the Baptist) reported all these things to him,"
which report caused John to send a deputation to Jesus to ask if he is "The
One." The reply was, in effect, "Judge me by what you see has happened."
The Revised Common Lectionary provides with this gospel the
reading from I Kings 17 in which Elijah is depicted as bringing a widow's son
back to life, albeit by more than just a spoken word. The obvious connection
between Zarephath and Nain is the proclamation of the funeral cortege to the
effect that "a great prophet has risen among us" and the widow of Zarephath's
exclamation that he who mooched the last of her barrel of flour and drops of
her oil was now to be seen as "a man of God, and that the word of Yahweh in your
mouth is truth." That latter is the spot-on description of a prophet, great or
otherwise.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
The story is that Elijah claimed to have been directed by
the guidance of Yahweh to take up residence beside a brook named "Cherith,"
there to be saved from a drought and consequent famine. Elijah will not only
have room beside a pleasant flow of potable water to slake his thirst and cool
his brow. He will also have board as a flock of ravens will bring him bread and
meat each morning and evening.
Some patient research of this text suggests that the Hebrew
word "Cherith" means something like "separate," and the ravens may have been
members of servile tribe afraid or a little in awe of Elijah, a fabled public
intellectual in antiquity. -- Take the text in light of 21st Century realities,
and you have a pampered elite living in a gated community, being waited on hand
and foot (or talon and beak, if you wish not to rationalize the ravens). Elijah
is separated from the sufferings of the world beyond the lush confines of his
brook until . . . until it comes to pass one day that the brook dries up and --
though the text does not specify it -- the ravens come no more.
That very kind of thing happened in America not so long ago
as fabulous fortunes gained on the backs of so-called ordinary citizens were
vaporized in a cloud of greedy over-reach. For a while, the haves lost access
to their brook, and their ravens took to flight.
But back to Elijah, who is now brook-less and raven-less,
and no doubt hungry, frazzled and not a little annoyed. The text says he heard
Yahweh's voice give him directions to a village later known as Serapta on the
Phoenician coast of the Mediterranean. If the brook Cherith is where we think
it was -- near Jericho -- it would have been quite a hike to undertake on an
empty stomach with parched tongue -- roughly 150 miles, if you could take it
along a straight line with no hills.
Elijah must have wondered what he had done to deserve that.
In any event, the text has us to believe he went there, only to discover a
widow gathering kindling for a fire over which to cook her and her son's last
meal, so devastated were they by the famine. Now comes this stranger to want,
asking to be cut in.
You can imagine the conversation: "Who are you?" / "I am the
man who has been resorting in a far country by a cool running brook and the
ravens brought me breakfast and dinner." / "Really? Did you ever ask anybody to
join you?" / "No, I didn't. I was kind of in hiding, unsure of what would come next.
But yesterday, the brook dried up and the ravens went away." / "Oh, did they
really?" she says, not really meaning it as a question. / "Yes, and now I am
hungry," Elijah says. / "YOU'RE hungry? Here I am," the widow says, "scraping
the bottom of my flour bin to make one last loaf for my son and me before we
die of hunger. And you, who lay by the Brook Cherith with the ravens feeding
you -- YOU'RE hungry??????"
Evidently impervious to embarrassment, Elijah pulled himself
up to the widow's table for what turned out to be nobody's last meal. Surely
Elijah had not come away from Cherith without some remnant of the ravens'
twice-daily proffered fare tucked into his rucksack against the coming and
going of a meal-time. We are to assume that he added from his relative plenty
to the widow's well-nigh absolute want, and, behold, a partnership forged in
sufficiency at least unto a day.
Elijah was not a Lady Bountiful but presented himself as a
member of the family, sharing at table what little he had with the widow who
shared what little she had. Then he stuck around long enough to do what was
necessary to preserve the life which that meal had sustained. Therein is the
template of righteousness.
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