Nineteenth Sunday

Nineteenth Sunday Ordinary
August 13, 2006

"He prayed for death saying: “This is enough, O LORD! Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” (1 Kgs 19:4-8) "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” (John 6:41-51)

Elijah holds a special place in Jewish history and lore. He has no known ancestry, something very rare in the Hebrew Scriptures. His name contains the sacred Hebrew letters of God's name. He "stands before God" all by himself with only his faith in the Most High. He opposes Ahab and Jezebel and their foreign God (Ba'al), sending a drought on the land and slaying 450 priests of their cult. This is another good reason not to take everything in the Bible literally. We would certainly not want to return to this primitive stage of religious thought and practice where violence is sanctioned as being the will of God. Tragically it is still happening in our own day. The story is that Elijah did not die but ascended into the heavens on a fiery chariot. In Jesus' time it was widely believed that his return from the sky would be a sign of the coming of the Messiah. Recall that he was seen with Moses when Jesus was revealed to the disciples as God's favored one on the mountain of the Transfiguration.

In our passage Elijah is being chased all over the countryside by Jezebel's henchmen. She wants to kill him for interfering with her plans to hold on to the power and wealth of Ahab's court. Exhausted from the ordeal, he sits down under the shade of a tree and starts to whine and complain to Yahweh to just let him die rather than go on with his miserable life. The angel of God who appears to him in a dream, patiently listens and encourages him persistently to go on.

We, too, love to whine. I am a master of the art. A little bit of it can be very therapeutic, especially when done in fun. We all have a right to complain and feel sorry for ourselves. Sometimes we don't remember that a suffering person needs to be heard before being corrected. But a little of it goes a long way and too much drives a wedge between us and God and between us and other people. God's patience is endless but even our closest friends and family have their limits. Most of us have too much to whine about ourselves to listen to others for very long. Like Elijah's angel, good friends know when to listen to us complain and when to tell us that enough is enough. One of the arts of suffering is to discern when to complain, when to ask for help and when to suck it up.

Elijah, after eating a meal provided by God's angel, was strengthened to continue his life. In the same way God provides food for our journey to sustain us especially when we are weary and hard-pressed to continue by ourselves. The Spirit and the Sacrament is that food which Jesus refers to in the gospel. The people of God are that food when we support each other on the journey.