Food in the Desert
Our Old Testament lesson for this week sees Elijah at a time of transition (1 Kings 19:4-8). He has just demonstrated the power of God against the priests of Baal in one of the most dramatic miracle stories in the Old Testament. This may have been his single greatest accomplishment, but things started going downhill shortly afterward, as they so often do. First, he followed through on his victory by putting the false prophets to death, a brutal celebration to be sure, but this was a brutal time. The souls of the people of Israel were at stake. Judgment needed to be harsh to prevent the preservation and expansion of a false religion. At least, that’s how Elijah saw it.
Unfortunately for Elijah, not everyone saw it that way, and there are consequences for such actions. The evil queen Jezebel sought to put him to death. He may have gained a lot of political and social power when he defeated the priests in their contest, but that wouldn’t help him against the king and queen. He fled into the wilderness, a fugitive of the government. Even his greatest accomplishment wasn’t enough to turn the hearts of the kingdom back to God. The powers of evil had clamped their jaws hard upon his victory, devouring his joy, and leaving nothing but bare defeat and despair. He fled into the wilderness a broken man. This was a sudden and overwhelming turn from good to bad. Utter catastrophe.
That all happened before this passage. After our passage for this week, Elijah gets a second wind. He goes to the mountain of God, and encounters God in silence. Elijah speaks with God on that holy mountain, just as Moses had spoken with God there long before. Elijah complains about how hopeless the situation is. He is the only one left in Israel who hasn’t forsaken the Lord. Everyone else is either dead or a follower of Baal. At least within the kingdom of Israel, good has failed, evil has conquered. Elijah has lost. All his zeal was insufficient. His passion was all in vain.
However, God disagrees. God responds to Elijah by telling him to go continue his work. He is told to anoint two kings and call Elisha to be his successor. God then reassures him that there is a remnant left in Israel that God is preserving. It isn’t over. It isn’t hopeless. God hasn’t lost. God is just now beginning to fight.
Elijah sets out and meets Elisha who quickly begins to follow him. Then the story turns away from Elijah for a while, but he comes back in the role he played before, denouncing the evil monarchy and communicating God’s will to the people. So, just as before this story Elijah went from triumph to despair, after this week’s passage, he went from hopeless to confident. He may have been defeated, but God was not. Elijah returns to the front line of the conflict between God and the Baal worshipping royalty because he has realized that there is something worth fighting for. It’s not about himself. There is a remnant God is preserving, and this goes beyond Elijah’s lifetime. Elijah is fighting for them, for God.
At the critical point between these two extremes is our passage for this week. A defeated man goes into the desert. He just wants to die. His ego has been crushed. His hope has been shattered. Everything he worked for is lost. I must admit that I’ve never had to deal with something quite like this. I suppose this is what it feels like when a business you’ve founded goes bankrupt or a long lasting marriage fails. While Elijah didn’t die here, I think what he is experiencing is adjacent to death. He wants to die physically because mentally and emotionally he’s already there.
So, when Elijah goes out into the desert spiritually dead, depressed by the faithlessness of his own people and his inability to do anything to fix the world, God feeds him. God provides bread and water, and then Elijah falls asleep. He rests for a while before the angel of the Lord returns to rouse him for another meal. He must eat to have strength for the journey before him. Elijah goes from a mountaintop experience where he is personally on top of the world having God work for him to a desert where he is spiritually broken, but that is just the launching point for the journey to come. God feeds him enough for him to make it to Horeb, the mountain of God, where he listens to God in a new way. A mountaintop experience that challenges him and, in so doing, changes him even more than his previous triumph ever could have done.
We all have journeys that parallel Elijah’s here. I know I’ve gone from on top of the world to being at my lowest points within a matter of months before. When I’m taking classes those cycles can happen and repeat in mere weeks. A good comment from a teacher builds me up before a bad grade on a paper in a different class crushes me. But on a larger scale, I’ve gone from feeling fully fulfilled as a person to feeling broken.
When the dark times come, when our egos are crushed and we are driven out into the desert where we just want it to all be over, God feeds us. Our dark times are the launching points of our most important journeys, journeys on which we discover ourselves but in so doing learn that we aren’t the only ones that matter. While God certainly loves each and every one of us, we are all characters in a larger story that God is telling. When we feel like the last of our kind, broken, alone, and hopeless in a cruel world, God tells us that we are part of a community. There is something worth fighting for that goes beyond ourselves, beyond our lifetimes. When we are driven into the desert, God feeds us with the bread of life, the body and blood of Christ and the very Word of God, and that is strength enough for the journey.
