Suppose for a second about Mount Tabor. Keep in mind the blinding mild of Jesus' glory and the overwhelming presence of Elijah and Moses, the burden of that second and what it meant in Peter's thoughts and coronary heart, and what it confirmed concerning the dream that settled in his coronary heart and his religious creativeness. The brilliance of this dream—how extremely shut it was on Mount Tabor—creates an insufferable cognitive dissonance with the truth of Jesus, arrested, mocked, overwhelmed, despised, withdrawn, and executed. Useless within the grave.
These visions didn’t match collectively: the whitish white mild of the Transfiguration, the ashen linen that now lined Jesus' useless physique, and the stony darkness of the tomb because the stone rolled towards him. Peter anticipated Elijah: fireplace from heaven, earth cleansed of evil. What he obtained as an alternative – I don't suppose he had a reputation for it. I have no idea him.
However perhaps even Petr didn't know Eliáš.
Typically our expectations are the supply of our ache.
Peter checked out Elijah and noticed a victorious hero. However he solely paid consideration to a part of the story.
When Elijah humbled the prophets of Baal, the group of onlookers fell to the bottom and shouted, “Lord, it’s God! (1 Kings 18:39). Then they killed the prophets and cleansed the land of their oppression. Elijah then prayed for rain and it got here. Ahab fled to Jezreel, unable to disclaim what he had seen together with his personal eyes. Mission achieved.
And but it wasn't. Jezebel responded to every thing Ahab advised her by promising to kill Elijah, and the specter of humiliation and dying overwhelmed him. He fled into the desert, collapsed beneath a brush and prayed for dying. “I've had sufficient,” he mentioned. “Take my life; I’m no higher than my ancestors” (1 Kings 19:4). I hand over. I turned and ran. I failed. And I want I have been useless. It’s a cry of disillusionment and despair.
God gave Elijah the reward of sleep beneath a brush, woke him as much as feed him, and let him sleep once more. When Elijah awakened a second time, God fed him once more to strengthen him for the lengthy journey to Mount Sinai.
Elijah's journey from the broom to Sinai took 40 days and 40 nights – the identical time Goliath taunted the armies of Israel, a terrific flood lined all dwelling issues on earth, and later Jesus fasted within the desert. Elijah's struggling was not with out goal. On the different finish of the 40 days and 40 nights is the intersection with God, and Elijah will quickly have his.
The query God asks Elijah within the cave on Mount Sinai is the query He asks all of us who’re disillusioned and disoriented. “What are you doing right here Elijah?” (v. 9).
It isn’t not like the query Jesus asks nearly everybody he meets within the Gospels: “What would you like?
The reply isn’t straightforward to search out. It's arduous to say “I wish to return” as a result of that the homeland you miss was constructed on illusions to some extent. Disillusionment is a present on this approach, albeit an disagreeable one. However it is usually tough to call one thing higher.
Elijah's response is instructive, not as a result of it provides us the precise reply (as if there may be one), however as a result of it factors the best way ahead: he complains. Loud. No apology. “I gave you every thing, God. However now I'm alone. I’ve nowhere to belong. No sacred areas. Each reminiscence is haunted. Everybody I cherished and trusted both turned towards me or was crushed similar to me.”
I used to be raised to not complain, to see it as virtuous. Additionally they taught me lots about God's holiness and what we should always and shouldn't say or do earlier than him. However there’s a humorous stress between my trendy ideas and the attitudes of most of the fathers and moms of our religion within the Hebrew Bible. They’ve the insolence, the willingness to argue, complain or converse out of bare self-interest. Maybe that is one side of what it means to have childlike religion: to have the audacity to talk one's thoughts in a relationship the place the asymmetry of authority and management couldn’t be extra pronounced.
God tells Elijah to go up the mountain. From the textual content it seems not, as an alternative he watches from contained in the cave as a violent wind rises sufficient to tear the mountain aside and shatter the rocks. However God isn’t within the wind. Then the earthquake comes and God continues to be not there. Then comes the fireplace, however once more, God isn’t within the fireplace (1 Kings 19:11-12).
The account of God's absence within the wind, earthquake, and fireplace is much less about God and extra about Elijah. He’s a veteran of God's glory at Mount Carmel. It stands on maybe the holiest floor exterior of Jerusalem, on the mountain the place God as soon as appeared magnificently and renewed his covenant with Abraham's kids. However Elijah can not see God within the magnificent. The wind doesn’t transfer it. It doesn’t shake from earthquakes. The hearth retains him cool.
Because the final traces of wind die down and the final flames flip to embers, a deep silence settles over the mountain. Elijah hears God's voice there as a whisper. Nevertheless, there’s something else that the voice of God Elijah has been scuffling with up till now. He’s conscious of the divine presence in a brand new approach and is lastly drawn to it, strolling in the direction of the mouth of the cave as if to pay attention higher.
I learn this story as an outline of the journey of the center. It’s a image of the transformation that occurs on the opposite facet of grief. Perhaps it's not simply that God wasn't within the wind. (What would it not imply that he was “within the wind” anyway?) Slightly, it’s that Elijah misplaced the power to search out him within the wind. The glasses have been too difficult, too haunted by loss. Elijah's troubled and grief-stricken coronary heart wanted the silence on the opposite facet of the storm of wind and fireplace to listen to and acknowledge God's voice.
Elijah got here to Sinai in despair that his life and his desires have been over. He left understanding that the most effective elements of that dream—the hope of a restored and renewed Israel—have been and at all times had been in God's arms. Seven thousand folks, whose existence Elijah had no concept, remained trustworthy. The deeper consciousness was that he needn’t cling to the outcomes of what adopted. The previous cliché “God is in management” seems to be true, however it might solely be one thing we really study and let out after issues disintegrate.
Like disillusionment, despair is a illness just for true believers – dreamers and lovers. It intervenes when life falls aside, our sense of which means and goal fades away, when these closest to us grow to be incomprehensible or these we love disappear via lies, brokenness, or dying. Despair plagues the lonely and the forgotten, these whose prayers are echoed within the concrete grey sky.
Those that have by no means recognized it themselves usually encounter this deep darkness in others and are sometimes confused by it. The temptation to moralize is highly effective. “Put your hope in God,” the psalmist's cry can rapidly flip into “Cheer up already,” a sentiment that probably solely deepens despair by intensifying an individual's sense that one thing is incorrect with them, that their ache is invisible, and that they’re finally themselves.
What we see at Sinai is a sobriety and hope each for individuals who have suffered in religious darkness and for individuals who love and wish to assist those that are actually struggling. On the similar time, it reveals that there’s something lonely in that darkness, and that, like Elijah's journey first into the wilderness and eventually into the cave at Sinai, this journey additionally takes place in solitude.
Dante Hell has lengthy been understood as the best literary expression of this sort of encounter with disillusionment and despair. Nobody chooses exile and nobody chooses religious disillusionment. You merely get up and end up there questioning the place the sunshine went and the place to show subsequent. in HellDante finds himself trapped between the ravenous creatures and the gates of hell and discovers that the one approach out of the darkness is thru it.
So it’s with disillusionment. Although we might run or distract ourselves from it, it lurks just like the she-wolf and the leopard that hunted that nice Italian poet. Our approach out is to the place we concern, the best way that for Dante meant bearing witness to the nice evil of the world on his approach to redemption in Paradise.
For Elijah, it meant discovering solitude beneath a brush and on the fiery wall of Mount Sinai. There he found what we are able to all uncover on the opposite facet of grief – that he’s not alone. That beneath the noise of the storms and the warmth of the fires was the whisper of God, and that there’s at all times a remnant within the distance past us. We’re by no means really alone.
Mike Cosper is a director of CT Media.
Taken from My nation of residence by Mike Cosper. ©2024 by Michael D. Cosper. Utilized by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
