The God of Elijah
The Third Sunday after Pentecost Church of the Good Shepherd
Text: 1 Kings 21:1-21a The Rev. Ross M. Wright
God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is also the God of Elijah. He knows the thoughts and intentions of our hearts. From him, “no secrets are hid.” His anger burns against injustice, infidelity, against the Ahab’s and Jezebels of our day. He makes judgments about our behavior and acts on the basis of those judgments.
God’s wrath is a side of his personality that we may have a hard time accepting. We recoil from crude descriptions of divine wrath that depict God as petulant, vindictive, or arbitrary. And rightly so. God is not malicious or irascible. His anger is not unpredictable, as human anger often is. God’s wrath is the flip side of his love or “the fire of his love.”1 Anger is part of all passionate, loving relationships. C. S. Lewis expresses it well:
Anger – not peevish fits of temper, but just, generous, scalding indignation – passes (not necessarily at once) into embracing, exultant, re-welcoming love. That is how friends and lovers are truly reconciled. Hot wrath, hot love. Such anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it.2
Apart from divine wrath, there is no good news. Richard Niebuhr, who taught theology at Union Seminary in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, expresses powerfully what is lost from the gospel when we lose sight of the biblical understanding of divine wrath: A God without wrath brings men and women without sin into a kingdom without righteousness “through the ministration of a Christ without a cross.”3
We will rediscover God’s fiery love by returning to the Bible, and particularly, to the Old Testament. We need to learn what Elijah knew, that Yahweh has a moral character. His anger burns against injustice. And he doesn’t just sit there – he’s prepared to do something about it. We catch a glimpse of God’s “hot anger” and “hot love” in Elijah’s confrontation with Ahab in Naboth’s vineyard.
Ahab, having received word that Naboth has been stoned to death by Jezebel’s hit men, is making his way to Naboth’s vineyard, to take possession of his land. You will recall that previously, the king offered to buy the property or to give him another vineyard in exchange, and Naboth refused. But now that he is dead, Ahab figures that he can seize the property with impunity. Who will know? Who will protest? Who cares?
The Lord knows, and the Lord cares. And Elijah knows, presumably through divine revelation. So, as Ahab makes his way to Naboth’s vineyard, Elijah goes to meet him.
And Ahab said to Elijah, “So my enemy, you have found me, have you?” And he said “I have found you, because you have sold yourself in vain to do what is evil in the Lord’s eyes. Therefore, thus says the Lord: I will bring evil upon you and I will bring fire against you and I will put to death Ahab’s son, utterly forsaking him, hemming in and abandoning Israel.”4
This confrontation has all the elements of a court trial: Ahab is arraigned, charged, convicted, and sentenced. Although Elijah is speaking, it is the Lord who acts both as prosecutor and judge. The Lord holds court here.
First, Ahab is arraigned. When he sees Elijah, he acknowledges that he has been caught: “So my enemy, you have found me, have you?”
Second, he is accused. “Have you killed and also taken possession?” Ahab is accused on two counts – he is an accomplice in the murder of Naboth, and he intends to possess his land. Behind this second charge is a particular understanding of Israel’s relationship to the land.5 In the Old Testament, Yahweh gives land to particular tribes and families. The family’s soul is bound up with this particular piece of land. For this reason, the owner does not have the right to sell the land.6 He has the right of use but not of disposal. He holds the land in trust for the family. In Israel, the land belongs to the Lord.7
Third, Elijah brings evidence against Ahab: “You have sold yourself in vain to do what is evil in the Lord’s eyes.” In that one sentence, the entire plot is uncovered: Jezebel’s ruthless design to have Naboth falsely accused; the devious use of letters to set things in motion; her unwillingness to face Naboth himself, preferring to have her henchmen do the dirty work; the violent murder; the unlawful appropriation of the land. Most of the ten commandments are violated in this one act.
Finally, there is the sentence: “Thus says the Lord: Because you have done what is evil in the Lord’s eyes, I will bring evil upon you. I will bring fire against you, and I will put to death the son of Ahab, utterly abandoning him, hemming in and abandoning Israel.” The Lord’s anger burns against injustice, particularly when the rich and powerful take advantage of the poor. Whenever one of his children is violated, he takes it personally – as violation of himself. “As you did it unto the least of these my brethren, you did it unto me,” Jesus says.8 And the Lord does not just sit there and take it. In the face of cruelty and injustice, he is roused to action.
This passage raises all kinds of questions: Does God still act the way he did with Ahab? If so, then how is it that the Duvaliers, the Pol Pots, and the Milosevics perpetrate the most unspeakable atrocities with impunity? How do we explain the fact that often, we flagrantly disobey God’s laws and get away with it?
In addition to these questions, there is another question which might not be immediately evident to us but which is raised by biblical narrative itself: Why is Ahab judged so severely, by the removal of his family from the throne, while King David, who personally arranged for the death of Uriah so that he could marry the man’s wife, was judged less harshly? I wonder if you noticed the many parallels between this passage and the narrative of David and Bathsheba. In both cases, the king takes what is not his by right from a poor, righteous person. In both cases, the righteous man is knocked off so that the king can have the desired goods. In both cases, the king is unmasked and judged by the prophet – here, by Elijah, and in David’s case, by Nathan.
The answer to this question lies in the particular type of land which Ahab steals – a vineyard. Throughout the Old Testament and the New, the vineyard is a symbol for Israel. By taking possession of the Naboth’s vineyard, Ahab represents the forces which ravage and destroy God’s people. Jesus reserves some of his harshest words for the churchmen who are given stewardship of the church, the Lord’s vineyard, but act as if they own it and use it for selfish ends.9 Ultimately, we are faced here with the mystery of divine election. David, the ideal king, is elected to be the forerunner of the Messiah and therefore represents all those whom God chooses. Ahab represents that which God has passed over. He is the shadow side of election.
Where does this passage leave us? It places us before the mercy of God. He has mercy on whom he will have mercy and compassion on whom he will have compassion.10 Can we imagine what it would mean to be eternally abandoned by God? There are moments in every believer’s life when it feels as if God has left us. Maybe you feel that the Lord has treated you the way Elijah prophesies that the Lord will treat Ahab’s dynasty. Perhaps in a nightmare, we have felt momentarily what it would be like to be utterly abandoned to the forces of evil “which assault and hurt the soul,” to be without future and without hope in the world.
There is one place where we see clearly the reality of total abandonment by God – in the darkness at Noon on Good Friday; in the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”; at the point when he Son senses that the Father withdraws; at the moment when “God un-gods himself.”11 On the cross, hot wrath and mercy meet. The Father withdraws from the Son so that we may be reconciled to God.
God’s wrath is completely enclosed in his mercy, just as God’s mercy is completely enclosed in his wrath.12 Mercy has meaning only when you know that you deserve judgment. And even in wrath, mercy is present. Like the son in the far off country, we suddenly recognize our miserable estate and to return to the Father’s house.
1 Karl Barth’s phrase.
2Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 97. Lewis continues: “The angers, not the measured remonstrances of lovers, are love’s renewal. Wrath and pardon are both, as applied to God, analogies, but they belong together to the same circle of analogy – the circle of life, and love, and deeply personal relationships.”
3 A paraphrase of his characterization of liberal Protestantism in Christ and Culture.
4 My translation here and throughout. The Hebrew is considerably more colorful, as Elijah speaks of “urinating” upon Ahab’s dynasty, using the expression, “to piss on the wall.” Most translators tone down the expression, using language such as: “I will consume you,” (NRSV) or “I will make a clean sweep of you” (The Tanak, Jewish Publication Society [JPS]). In contrast to most translations, I follow JPS, translating the end of the imprecation, “every male, bond or free.”
5 The following is a paraphrase of R. B. Y. Scott, The Relevance of the Prophets (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 29.6 “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine” says the Lord. Lev. 25:23.
7 This statement should not be interpreted as endorsement of the policies of the modern state of Israel.
8 Matt. 25:40.
9 See Matt. 21:33-46.
10 Paraphrasing Ex. 33:19, which Paul quotes in Romans 9:14-15.
11 Jürgen Moltmann’s phrase in The Crucified God.12 Bonhoeffer’s phrase.