P&F Lectionary Commentary: 2 Pentecost 06/06/2010

Lectionary Commentary

1 Kings 17:8-24
Psalm 146
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17

1 Kings 17:8-24
The long form of the passage assigned for this day contains two miracle stories about the ministry of God through Elijah to the widow of Zarephath and her son. God has sent Elijah northwest out of Israelite territory into the Gentile settlements around Sidon, because the Baal-worship of Ahab and Jezebel has provoked Yahweh into sending a drought upon the land of Israel. Since Baal was generally held to be a god of thunderstorms and crop-sustaining rain, Elijah perceived and proclaimed the drought as a demonstration of Yahweh’s power over Baal. This of course has put Elijah in danger of Ahab’s anger, so God sends Elijah into territory where Ahab is not likely to be able to reach him. Elijah is commanded to stay with a widow in Zarephath; but having a hairy, half-wild “man of God” (a term originally meaning “divinity-man” or charismatic shaman) descend on her household is not particularly easy for the widow. The drought has made its effects felt in Sidon as well, and the widow does not have enough flour and oil to prepare bread for herself and her son, let alone a full-grown man who has come to her unexpectedly out of the blue. When she protests Elijah’s demand for food, Elijah promises that the flour and oil will be enough, and more than enough, for as long as the drought holds. She goes to bake the bread, and though she makes enough for her household and for Elijah, she does not use up the small amount of flour and oil in her kitchen, nor is it used up “for many days.” Later, the widow’s son becomes ill and dies, and the widow blames Elijah: his being a “man of God” means there is an aura of power about him, power to “bring her sin to remembrance,” power to enact God’s judgment by his very presence: the widow seems to feel that, although Elijah has not overtly judged or condemned her, his mere proximity has caused God to punish her sins by killing her son. Elijah, however, who in other circumstances is not at all reluctant to be the instrument of God’s judgment, does not regard the boy’s death as a just punishment but as an undeserved “calamity”; so he takes the boy into his own room and prays to God not to “let this child’s life come into him again.” The boy revives, Elijah brings him to his mother, and she calls Elijah a “man of God” a second time, this time recognizing that the aura of power about him is not only one of judgment but one of creativity as well. The widow’s change in thinking about the “man of God” from an agent of punishment to an agent of creativity is perhaps the key to interpreting the passage. The two miracles Elijah mediates are miracles of abundance set in a context of deprivation: though the drought means that food is lacking and life is precarious, God’s work through Elijah for those who are open to it means food and life that are enough and more than enough. God’s will is for abundance; but God always works with the world as it is to draw it toward what it can be. In the case of Ahab and Jezebel, their turning from Yahweh to Baal impedes the divine aim for abundance, and God’s work through Elijah for them is drought. For the widow and her son, who accept Elijah (even if grudgingly at first), God’s work is for abundance. The story invites us to two different kinds of questions for our lives: How can we, like the widow, open ourselves to God’s will for abundance? How can we, like Elijah, mediate God’s will for abundance through the “auras” and “fields of force” of our experiences and actions?

Psalm 146
Psalm 146 directly complements the 1 Kings reading and the Luke reading in verse 9b, stating aphoristically what the stories shows narratively: that God “upholds the orphan and the widow.” But the psalm more generally poses a contrast between “princes” and mortal rulers, “in whom there is no help,” and those who are oppressed, hungry, imprisoned, blind, bowed down, and strangers, whom God helps. God alone “keeps faith forever” and “will reign forever … for all generations.” Therefore those who rely on God have a help that is reliable forever, but those who rely on their own princely state have no such reliance, and “when their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.” The psalm as a whole complements the implicit contrast in 1 Kings between Ahab and Jezebel and the widow and her son, while at the same time inviting us into a wider meditation on the tension between pride and humility and reliance on God’s aims in our own lives.

Galatians 1:11-24
This passage gives us one of the rare glimpses into Paul’s personal history afforded in the Epistles; in this case, his account of his conversion and early preaching. Luke’s account in Acts gives the details of the well-known Damascus road experience; all Paul himself says is that “God … was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.” Paul does not include any details of that revelation, only that he regards it as a resurrection appearance of Jesus, on a par with those appearances to the other apostles, and that the good news of new life in Jesus communicated to him in that revelation “is not of human origin.” Paul gives this glimpse of his personal history to the Galatians as part of a larger effort to establish his apostolic credentials, to establish the authority of his teaching over against those other teachers who have come to the Galatian church since Paul’s founding and have taught that the Gentiles among them must accept Torah and circumcision before they can truly follow Jesus. Paul asserts that his own teaching that Gentiles do not need to become Jews before they can be Christians is superior, and it is superior because it has come to him directly from God through Jesus, and not through any direction or instruction from the Jerusalem—and Jewish-Christian—leaders of the church. Paul offers the extent and success of his preaching in Syria and Cilicia, while he was “still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea that are in Christ,” as evidence of the authority and authenticity given to him by God. But more importantly, Paul offers his own transformation as evidence of the power of his gospel: his change from “violently persecuting the church” and “trying to destroy it” to being one of the young church’s most persuasive missioners, without the backing of the Jerusalem authorities, is in itself, he argues, a sign of the true creative power of God at work in him. The fact that the churches in Judea “glorified God because of me” sight unseen is a testimony to the fact that God is at work in him and his teaching is therefore authoritative. Whether Paul’s argument scored any points with the circumcision party in Galatia is not a matter of historical record. But his offer of personal transformation as a sign of the authentic work of God in him is a model that has been followed by Christian witnesses and preachers and teachers ever since. It invites us to consider what, if God’s creative grace can transform a persecutor like Paul into a faithful witness, that same creative grace might do in us.

Luke 7:11-17
After the long Easter season and the “extraordinary” Trinity Sunday, the lectionary on this day returns to Ordinary Time and in-course readings from Luke, the principal Gospel of Year C. At first glance, this story of the reviving of the widow’s son at Nain may seem like a simple continuation of the Easter resurrection theme; but the story has its own place and its particular function in Luke’s overall scheme of Jesus’ mission and ministry. The incident at Nain happens fairly early in Jesus’ public ministry, well before his first prediction of his passion and resurrection. Just before this miracle, Jesus had called his first disciples, performed his first healing signs, chosen the Twelve, and given his “Sermon on the Plain.” He had healed the slave of the centurion who built the synagogue at Capernaum, and then had come to Nain. After Nain, Jesus is met by disciples of John the Baptist who question “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”, to which Jesus responds “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.” In other words, the reviving of the widow’s son is part of Jesus’ credentials as the Christ, one of the messianic acts that identifies him as the one who is to come. Just as Elijah’s reviving the widow’s son at Zarephath convinced her that the “man of God” is a force for creativity as well as judgment, so Jesus’ reviving the widow’s son at Nain shows forth his power to “do good” and “heal those oppressed by the devil” because he is “anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power” as God’s chosen one (as Luke summarizes the mission of the Christ in Acts 10:38). In this context, the reviving of the young man should probably be thought of as a miracle of healing rather than as analogous to Jesus’s own resurrection; Jesus restores the young man to the quality of life he had before his illness, whereas the resurrection narratives indicate Jesus being raised to a qualitatively different kind of life. In fact, the healing miracle is a double restoration, restoring health to the young man and at the same time restoring to the widow her only means of support; both their lives are saved by the intervention of Jesus. Finally, as the widow of Zarephath came to believe in Elijah, the entire town of Nain comes to believe in Jesus as “a great prophet” and one through whom “God looks favorably on his people.” The entire episode is designed to reveal Jesus as the one through whom the creativity of God enters into situations of loss and grief and brokenness in human life, so as to create the possibility of restoration and to open the way to transformation.

Paul S. Nancarrow is the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton, Virginia, where he makes use of process ideas in preaching, worship, pastoral care, and leadership.He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and writes a regular column on liturgy for Creative Transformation.

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