The Prophet's Tears

2 Kings 2:1-12; Mark 9:2-9; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6

There are some passages of scripture that become indelibly etched in one’s memory. I can’t remember the when, but I do remember the how of my first encounter with Elijah and Elisha and the chariots of fire. It was back in the time when religious programs were easily found on popular radios stations. I can’t remember the name of the program but it came on every Sunday afternoon and was a kind of radio theater of Bible stories. If I recall there was an adult character or two and a couple of children who interacted with them around the details of the story as it was told. It was a kind of mini church school class. I don’t remember all the stories which were told, but this one has stuck with me all these years.

There are a variety of levels in this story. There is the near-heart-wrenching break up of the teacher-student relationship of Elijah and Elisha. And if you think about the whole of the Elijah saga, you realize that at this point Elijah has his spunk back. He was pretty demoralized after the contest on Mt. Carmel when he caused the thrice-drenched sacrifice and stone altar to be incinerated which made a mockery of the 450 prophets of Baal attached to Queen Jezebel’s court. Elijah had the failed prophets put to death. The queen then put a bounty on Elijah. He fled to the desert, was nourished by an angel from God for forty days until he encountered God in the stillness of silence. God told him to stop feeling sorry for himself because he wasn’t the last of God’s prophets or followers. God told Elijah to get up, go anoint kings over Aram and Israel, and train Elisha as his successor.

In this reading, this transfer of prophetic authority from Elijah to Elisha is seen to be more than just the transfer of power, as we do every quadrennial Inauguration Day when one elected President hands over the government to the next elected President. To be Elijah’s heir entails a great deal more than simply doing miracles similar to those of the master. To go in the footsteps of Elijah, Elisha must go wherever Elijah went – Bethel, Jericho, Jordan – bear the same burdens, risk the same dangers, experience the same hardships, and venture into times of both solitariness and solidarity in order to receive and ultimately bear the word of the Lord.

Prophetic work is not something that is taken up lightly. It is not fair weather work. It is not an “easy A” course at the rabbinical university. In fact the exchange of the prophet’s mantle between Elijah and Elisha manages to crumple up all the romantic notions we have of prophet’s peering into the mists of the future and announcing what will one day come to pass, or calling down God’s wrath on divine enemies and miscreants.

To be a prophet is not to be the solitary future-gazer or the herald of God’s impending judgment. To be a prophet is to enter deeply into the realities and relationships of the people to whom the prophet is sent. To be a prophet is not to be anonymous or dispassionate. Nor does a prophet stand impersonally outside of or apart from the community. The prophetic word is potent because it comes from the community to which it is addressed. The word is driven by the anguish of witnessing the disparity between the grand desire of God for God’s people and the extreme poverty of the reality God’s people have been forced to accept. To be a prophet is, in the words of David Lose, to love God’s people enough to tell them the truth about their condition.

This potent God-blessed, God-sparked love is the basis for the Confession of Belhar which the Sunday morning class finished studying last week. South African people of color like Allan Boesak, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and countless others dared to say to the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, once spawned for blacks and coloreds by the white Dutch Reformed Church, and say to the world at-large, that the reality of apartheid was not the reality that God desired for South Africans or for anyone else.

To be a prophet in this tradition is to step out into the open, to refuse the institutional armor as David refused Saul’s armor for the combat with Goliath. To be a prophet like Elijah and Elisha is to take up vulnerability, to lay aside all the human-made physical, ideological, and theological armaments and to live totally dependent on God’s word and God’s mercy. This is what Jesus spoke to when he swept aside the idea of Peter to build shrines for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration. Nothing must stand between the prophet and God or between the prophet and God’s people to whom the prophet is sent and with whom the prophet stands against the anti-divine reality the people have been forced to accept.

That is why the need for two helpings of Elijah’s spirit which Elisha requests as the elder prophet’s parting gift to his successor. Only Elijah doesn’t have the power to make that gift. Elisha’s prophetic ministry will depend ultimately on God and on Elisha’s willingness to commit the totality of his life to God, to make himself without obstruction vulnerable to God’s will for his life and to the antagonism and antipathy of the world in desperate need of God’s saving grace.

Even though the parting of Elijah and Elisha and the transfiguration of Jesus are epic moments of God’s presence breaking into human existence, this attitude of vulnerability is the key link between fiery chariot and horses and the mist-enshrouded mountaintop voice reiterating the divinely spoken message from Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, whom I dearly love.” The message at the baptism was addressed to Jesus, “With you I find happiness.” On the mountain the message was addressed to the two disciples and eventually the entire community: “Listen to him!”

The command often has an exclamation point. It is not likely a “pretty please” kind of request. It is the kind of command that a parent gives a child. Yet there is still some possible variation there. Does it mean, “Do as I say! Now! Or Else!” or does it mean, “Pay attention! Watch what I am doing so you can do it too.” I think it is more of the latter. While Jesus did preach from time to time, he was much more of an educator. He once said to a group of listeners, “Put on my yoke, and learn from me” (Matthew 11:29).

Jesus led his companions down the mountain and back to the reality of the people to whom and for whom he was called. He told the two to keep the details of what they had experienced to themselves until the time after the Human One – the Son of Man – Jesus – had risen from the dead. He knew that only then would they be able to process what had happened and what the message was for them and for all God’s people.

Jesus went down the mountain to be vulnerable: to love God and love the people, to be betrayed, and to be made to suffer and die on the cross. He anticipated and accepted this reality only by trusting completely in God’s mercy.

Jesus calls us to be vulnerable. This is not the “Keep calm and have stiff upper lip” mentality that is so often doled out. We have received it, and we have given it. “Buck up.” “Stop being a cry baby.” “Get a grip.” Jesus was not impassive. Jesus was not a stoic. In taking on human life – your and my life – he allowed himself to be open to and to experience to the fullest every human emotion, every human pain and elation, every human reality.

If a person believes that life is against them, that everyone is out to get them, life will be bleak. But if a person believes the overwhelming mercy of God, then no matter what life throws at us, we will not be overcome. The prophet’s tears pour out of his vulnerability. Jesus wept for Jerusalem. Jesus invites us to weep for the world.

Our strength does not come through stiff upper lips but through broken hearts and helping hands. Our strength does not come from hate but from love. Our strength does not come from ourselves but from God. To be prophetic in our community is to be immersed in the challenges confronting God’s people and, amid those difficulties, to throw ourselves to the mercy of the God of Elijah and Elisha, the God we know most fully in the dearly loved Son, and to give voice to God’s vision for wholeness and life, both for us and through us for the world.

May it be so. Amen.

General Resource: David J. Lose, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, pp. 435-439.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.

Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.