INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE
Year C - Proper 5
(NOTE: During the Season of Pentecost, some traditions follow a different set of readings from the Old Testament and Psalms. These alternate readings will be included in both the brief introductions and the more complete analyses.)
I KINGS 17:8-16. (Alternate 17:17-24) This passage introduces of a series of stories in which Elijah the prophet appears as God’s spokesperson in very difficult times during the 9th century BCE. Both passages reveal Elijah as a man of God who follows God’s directions. The alternate reading raises the serious question of how we deal with the all too common experience of having good things turn out badly. Does such experiences hinder us from following God’s will to love others with abandon, “wastefully,” as John S. Spong says?
PSALM 146. This brief psalm of praise, one of the five exultant hymns that end the Psalter, celebrates the hopes of Israel in God’s desire for freedom and justice.
PSALM 30. (Alternate) The psalmist praises God for saving him from death in a critical illness. After at first expressing overconfidence about God’s favor, he realizes how much he owes to God for answering his prayer of distress.
GALATIANS 1:11-24. To convince the Galatians of his trustworthiness, Paul reviews his past as a faithful Jew who first persecuted the Christians in Jerusalem, then received his own call to be an apostle to the Gentiles in a direct revelation from Jesus himself.
LUKE 7:11-17. This passage tells of Jesus raising a widow’s only son is reminiscent of a similar miracle performed by Elijah. Undoubtedly that Old Testament story influenced Luke’s narrative, as the people’s astonished reaction shows.
A MORE COMPLETE ANALYSIS.
I KINGS 17:8-16 (Alternate 17:17-24). This passage introduces of a series of stories in which Elijah the prophet appears as God’s spokesperson in very difficult times during the 9th century BCE. Frequent references to Elijah in the New Testament Gospels indicate how important this cycle of stories was in the Hebrew scriptures.
After the reigns of David and Solomon, a civil war had divided their kingdom in two. The northern ten tribes continued the name of Israel but were ruled by kings not descended from David with Samaria as their capital city. Judah, formed by the southern two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, was smaller and weaker, but maintained the Davidic dynasty and its capital in Jerusalem.
Elijah the Tishbite, came from Gilead, one of ten tribal regions of the northern kingdom Israel. He was a strong leader of Yahwism during a time of serious encroachment by Baalism from the coastal region of Tyre. His dominant opponent was Jezebel, King Ahab’s Tyrian queen. It is manifestly significant that these two incidents took place in Sidon, also on the coast and closely associated with Tyre.
No clear information has ever been found as to the location of Tishbe in Gilead, the name of the town from which Elijah supposedly came. Some maps do show the site of Tishbe near the Wadi Cherith in Gilead, an eastern tributary of the Jordan River. The name may have been related to an occupational name for a tribe of non-native settlers, (“one of the toshab class”) the Kenites, renamed the Rechabites, whom Solomon engaged in the importation of horses and chariots (1 Kings 10:26-29).After following instructions from Yahweh to go to the Wadi Cherith, Elijah was sustained during a severe drought and famine by ravens that brought him food morning and evening (vss. 2-7). A subsequent message from Yahweh sent the prophet to Zarephath, a town near Sidon on the Mediterranean coast. There he asked a widow for food and drink, but she pleaded that she had only enough for herself and her son before suffering from starvation. Elijah promised in Yahweh’s name that her meal and oil would never run out (vss. 8-16) Later, according to the alternate reading (vss. 17-24), the widow’s son became ill and died, but Elijah revived him in a vividly described demonstration of the power of prayer.
Both passages reveal Elijah as a man of God who obeyed divine commands to go wherever he was sent. In doing so, he provided sustenance for a widow whose jars of meal and oil miraculously never failed and subsequently raised the widow’s son from the dead.
PSALM 146. This brief psalm of praise, one of the five exultant Hallel psalms that end the Psalter, celebrates the hopes of Israel in God’s desire for freedom and justice. The prophetic theme of hope of restoration sounds through the latter part of the song. It sings the praise of Yahweh as creator and redeemer, especially of those who are powerless and marginalized.
Vs. 3 points out the sharp contrast between the trustworthiness of Yahweh and the inconsistency of mortal sovereigns. The psalmist knew this from Israel’s long history of monarchs who failed to provide peace and security for their people in violent times much like those of our time in the Middle East.
Vss. 7b-9 repeats the name of Yahweh five times, as always translated “the Lord.” One can imagine those familiar with the words joining their voices to the cantor in a jubilant crescendo as the divine tetragrammaton YHWH was recited in whatever way this sacred name was used. Then in the closing benediction proclaiming the eternal sovereignty of Yahweh, the congregation responds with a final outburst of praise.
PSALM 30. (Alternate) The psalmist praises God for saving him from death in a critical illness. After at first expressing a certain overconfidence about God’s favor (vss. 6-7), he realizes how much he owes to God for answering his prayer of distress.
It is natural for a person to be exuberant about being restored suddenly to good health. Even with modern medicine capable of curing or alleviating many of the most severe illnesses once regarded as fatal less than a century ago, the fear of death persists. The Psalmist’s fear of death was expressed in vs. 2.
The Pit was another common Old Testament term, among several others, for the abode of the dead. Sheol was by far the most common, occurring sixty six times. Unlike the others, however, it was unique to the Hebrew language, and does not occur in any other Semitic language. Generally, the various terms for the abode of the dead conveyed the idea of a permanent, shadowy, chaotic but silent place. No Old Testament reference contains any concept of punishment or torment. The concept of an infernal hell came into existence only during the Hellenistic period probably influenced by Persian ideas.
The traditional concept of illness resulting from divine anger still lingers as the philosophical matrix of the poem (vs. 5). Despite this shadowed background to the psalm and the loss of prosperity, the poet had unmitigated praise for God’s beneficence. His pride had been restored to the extent that he could question divine justice in the death he had so recently escaped (vs. 9). His mourning had been transformed into joy (vs. 11).
In the 2nd century BC, the psalm came into liturgical use for the rededication of the temple by Judas Maccabaeus now celebrated at the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.
GALATIANS 1:11-24. To convince the Galatians of his trustworthiness, Paul reviewed his past as a faithful Jew who first persecuted the Christians in Jerusalem, then received his own call to be an apostle to the Gentiles in a direct revelation from Jesus himself.
Paul often appeared as a person uncertain of his acceptance in the early Christian Church. In several of his letters, notably Corinthians and Galatians, he tried to reinforce his apostleship by frankly acknowledging how he had persecuted the church. At times he revealed a very low self-image, to use a modern psychological term for this personality trait. (Cf. 1 Cor. 15:9; Eph. 3:8)
On the other hand, Paul did not leave the matter there. He quickly asserted that his call to be the apostle to the Gentiles came directly from Jesus whose risen presence he had experienced in a dramatic epiphany on the Damascus Road. Because he was so deeply conscious of and perhaps still felt guilty about his previous life, he put that experience in the context of grace. In vs. 15 of this passage, he also described his vocation as preordained from birth.
Paul’s further elaboration of what he did after his conversion does not correlate with other summaries we have of that period. Except in this passage, no mention is made of his three year Arabian sojourn. He could have been referring to the vast stretch of territory along the major trade route from Damascus to the Red Sea ,formerly known as Edom/Idumea, then in the hands of the Nabateans whose capital was in Petra southeast of the Dead Sea (Cf. Acts 9:26-30; 26:12-20).
None of the sources should be treated as biography. However, in his Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography, Bruce Chilton states that it was during this time that Paul “worked out the implications of his vision for himself during three years of self-imposed exile from all the people he knew, whether in Jerusalem or Tarsus.” Thus we are left with somewhat incoherent details that must remain forever so, despite the adamant claim in Gal. 1:20, “In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!” Even the apostle must be seen as one who looked back on his life, in this passage at least, with some ambivalence.
LUKE 7:11-17. This passage tells of Jesus raising a widow’s only son was reminiscent of a similar miracle performed by Elijah. (1 Kings 17:17-24) Undoubtedly that Old Testament story influenced Luke’s narrative, as the people’s astonished reaction shows (vs. 16).
The emphasis in the story here was on Jesus’ compassion for the widow, not on his power to raise the dead. It exhibited Jesus’ gracious concern for the most vulnerable and helpless. By touching the bier, he exposed himself to contamination according to traditional Jewish holiness code. At the same time, he demonstrated that liturgical purity yields to the higher law of mercy (cf. Numbers 19:11). It is noteworthy that Jesus’ final action of giving the resuscitated man to his mother repeats the exact words of 1 Kings 17:23.
As Prof. George Caird asserted, there is no doubt the early church did have strong convictions that Jesus did return to life those whom others had declared dead. (Caird, George B. St. Luke. Pelican New Testament Commentaries, 1963, 110) Jesus is the source of life, Luke forcefully asserted in this pericope. So also should we be making the same assertion today.
While the story as Luke told it may cause skepticism to modern minds, there are significant values for our time to be found in his brief narrative of the miracle. To see the relevance of this pericope, we need only think of the contrast between governmental spending on weapons of war and that spent on education, health and alleviation of poverty in many nations including our own. There is also the steadily widening gap and lack of compromise between progressive and conservative political economies in Europe and North America regarding the ways to respond to the current financial crisis brought on by ever increasing national and international debt. Jesus did not offer political or economic solutions to modern problems. He did give us insight into God’s way of dealing with human misery and distress with endless compassion and kindness.
SOME ADDITIONAL PREACHING POINTS.
I KINGS 17:8-16. (Alternate 17:17-24). John Shelby Spong wrote the following in his weekly blog for May 5, 2010, in which he discussed the tragic death of a 25 year old daughter of close friends:
“Is it not in loving another and in giving ourselves to another that the essence of living and the joy of meaning are found? It is not easy to be human, but does not the joy outweigh the pain? So we have to choose. I choose life and love. I choose life-giving relationships even though this means that I must eventually endure pain and loss....
If God is experienced as the source of life, then the only way to worship God is by living fully and, the more fully I live, the more this God, this source of life, becomes visible. I now see God as the source of love that is also in every living thing. Love is the power that enhances life and it is present in plants that turn their leaves to the sun, in the birds that feed their young in the nest, in the cat that licks the fur of its kittens, but this instinctual life-giving power comes to self-consciousness only in human beings. If God is experienced as the source of love, then the only way I can worship God is by loving wastefully, and the more wastefully I love, the more I make God visible. (Emphasis mine.)
GALATIANS 1:11-24. One historian described the Paul’s Arabian period as “a mysterious pause, a moment of suspense, in the apostle's history, a breathless calm, which ushers in the tumultuous storm of his active missionary life.” See this website:
http://www.christiananswers.net/dictionary/paul.html .
Another website elaborates:
(http://www.truthinhistory.org/tracing-the-steps-of-the-apostle-paul.html)
“From the reading of the text in Acts 9:26-28 one would get the impression that Saul went directly from his escape at Damascus to Jerusalem. By his own admission he clarified the fact in his letter to the Galatians (1:16-17) that he "conferred not with flesh and blood" nor consulted with the Apostles in Jerusalem; but the Lord’s choice for him was to go to Arabia to be trained in the school of the Spirit in order that he might receive greater revelations concerning the mysteries of the Gospel of the glorified Christ.
Nowhere in the Scriptures does it indicate which part of the vast area of Arabia he went to, but we can safely assume it was somewhere east of Damascus. In the writings of Luke in the book of Acts, he omits any mention of Paul’s trip to Arabia. At that time the area known as Arabia included the region governed by Aretas ( II Cor. 11:32) which extended from Damascus and east of the Jordan River south to Edom with Petra as its capital.”
Bruce Chilton added a note to his brief summary of the Arabian hiatus that there was no significant penetration of successful proselytizing among the Nabateans in Acts. “Not mentioning Arabia would be sensible, however, if an apostle dear to Acts had tried to convert people there and gotten nowhere.” (Chilton, Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography. Image Books, Doubleday, 2004. 276, n.12)
LUKE 7:11-17. Is there some reason to think of Luke’s Gospel as a further extension Mark’s structure of the narrative of Jesus’ life as stories invented by to tie in with the weekly lectionary in the Hellenist Jewish synagogues? In Jesus for the Non-Religious J. S. Spong presents this thesis as the basis for understanding how the Gospels were composed. The theory was first proposed by Michael Goulder (1974) following Austin Farrer who had discarded the Q theory dating from the early 20th century (1957, 1966). This highly speculative approach states that Jesus life and death first set forth in Mark can be seen as a interpretive liturgy for Hellenist Jewish Christians of the Diaspora still gathering on the Sabbath in synagogues on the great Jewish festivals from Rosh Hashanah to Passover. Similarly, in Matthew and Luke the scriptures were read and reinterpreted in terms of the period extending from Passover to Rosh Hashanah again.
On May 13, 2010 J. S. Spong summarized the composition of the Gospels In his weekly article published on the Internet:
“What Mark had done was to provide Jesus stories appropriate to the synagogue celebrations from Rosh Hashanah (the John the Baptist story) to Passover (the crucifixion story). Rosh Hashanah, however, comes in the mid fall of the year and Passover comes in the early spring, so the gospel of Mark only covered six and a half months of the twelve month year, leaving out the five and a half months that separate Passover from Rosh Hashanah. There was, therefore, a desire after Mark's gospel appeared to fill in that blank space with additional Jesus material, which soon became an imperative need. Within about a decade, Matthew wrote the first expansion of Mark and aimed his story at the disciples of Jesus who worshipped in rather traditional Jewish synagogues. Luke wrote the second expansion of Mark and he aimed his story at the community of Jesus' disciples who worshipped at synagogues that were made up of dispersed Jews and those Gentile proselytes, who were beginning to be drawn into the synagogue community.” (Origins of the New Testament - Part XXIII: Matthew and the Liturgical Year of the Synagogue in An New Christianity For A New World. Subscribe to website at $26 US annually here: http://www.johnshelbyspong.com/publicsite/index.aspx.)
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