First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation,because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (1 Peter 1:20)
Peter’s admonition presents a challenge to the reader and especially the preacher. If we cannot trust our own interpretation of scripture, whose can we trust? There are Christians, mostly very evangelical ones, some of them senior politicians in America, who, let us assume, honestly believe the Holy Spirit talks to them directly. But as a leading Jesuit has pointed out we need to be very careful when we think God is talking to us directly; that is not his habit. Rather, I suggest, we can be guided by people wiser and more experienced than ourselves but finally, we must decide for ourselves.
We cannot ignore the obvious fact that the Holy Spirit has had to speak through the medium of human writers and human thinkers working with their own mindsets and for audiences with understanding and experience which differs wildly over the ages. Some religions-some Christians even- believe the Word of God is just that, and that scripture is the record of angelic or divine dictation. But even those religions, like Christianity, have immense literatures which attempt to interpret what was recorded and make it meaningful for their contemporaries. The challenge is to see how ideas and beliefs very different from ours can, with the guidance of theologians old and new, be married and made meaningful with our own intuition.
The Jewish tradition, particularly rich in such interpretation, regards what we think of as the history books of the Bible as Prophecy along with the works of those like Isaiah and co. who we think of as “Prophets”. And the story of Elijah, a pre-eminent “Prophet”, is much more about what he did than what he said. Prophecy- the revelation of God’s will – is seen in history, notably the chequered history of the Israelites. So, an important element of that interpretation should be to try to understand something of the writers’ idea of history, as a way of enlightening us as to what the Holy Spirit might be telling us.
For the writers recording Elijah’s adventures history was not, or not only, as we have tended to see it progressing slower and faster towards the present in a more or less straight line, with Golden Ages remembered and Dark Ages endured. The horrors of the last century and increasing awareness of the cruelty of colonialism and slavery force us to rethink what “progress” might mean, but most of us do at least hold to the idea that things ought to get better for everyone.
The Ancient Hebrews saw their own history as progressing and regressing to and from the Promised Land and a righteous society, but also repeating itself in similar personal and national experiences which echo each other. This happens most notably in the story of salvation the people experienced at Passover, escaping the Egyptian army by walking through the Red Sea and then spending 40 years wandering the desert discovering and establishing themselves as a nation and their relations with God through the mediation of Moses on Mt Horeb. Exile and return; the passage though water; and the desert as a place of penitence, contemplation and affirmation of faith as well as a refuge from danger and annihilation, are all themes reappearing throughout the Old Testament and echoed again in the New.
We can immediately see the parallels – the repetition – of this in the story of Elijah fleeing the wrath of Ahaz and Jezebel; like the Israelites in the wilderness, he is fed bread and water by divine intervention and spends 40 days (not years) wandering and fasting. Like the Israelites he is still frightened despite their escapes and resentful that God has put them/him in this position. Like the Israelites who work out their role as God’s special people, Elijah must assess his position as prophet. As in the story of Exodus there are terrifying geophysical phenomena; wind, fire and earthquakes but there is a twist too as God is not in the noise, or the commotion but revealed as a still small voice of calm.
The perhaps surprising thing is the instructions that the small voice gives; we somehow expect something mild and conciliatory. But no; it the same old story-“Kill them all”. We could be in the Holy Land right now. Belligerent Zionists might see the history of last 60 years in the Holy Land as the great cycle coming round again.
We cannot know exactly what contemporary readers of the Book of Kings understood from this cyclical repetition; it’s tempting to think they saw some progression, or at least amplification in for example the way in which God has moved on from being a weather god, or water or earthquake god into one who listens to and can converse with his creatures. I suspect however our desire to read development into the story is our in-built Whig or Marxist view of history; we can’t help thinking that overall, things are getting better, or that they should be.
Rather, perhaps what the Holy Spirit is really wanting to tell us is that the essential story, seen repeatedly, is that of salvation. As Christians we believe in a decisive and world changing intervention by God, which while it falls in with the same pattern as those explored in the Old Testament, ends with a reshaping of Creation in the Garden on Easter morning. That event does not obliterate the past; there is much to learn from the Old Testament, and it would be inconceivable to try to understand the Gospel without knowing much of the story that it completes, by going back to the beginning again. This is, I believe, what Jesus taught in that mysterious conversation on the road to Emmaus.
Thus it is that although told by fallible human writers and prophets, the work of the spirit, blowing through men’s antics and men’s achievements, may touch us and help us to understand the nature of God and ourselves and our salvation through scriptures. Amen