Every time we recite the Creed we declare that the Gospel and specifically the` death and resurrection of Jesus was “in accordance with the Scriptures”. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says that he has come not to change but to fulfil the law and the prophets. His contemporaries think he must be a reincarnation of Elijah or one of the prophets, which is fulfilment in the sense of repetition or return. The risen Jesus in Luke’s Gospel explains his death and resurrection to Cephas and his companion on the way to Emmaus by interpreting the prophets “in the things concerning himself”.
It’s not, however, obvious how the Old Testament does prefigure or predict the Gospel. There are many “antetypes”; stories or events which seem to prefigure in some way events in the Gospels; tonight’s story of Elisha is one, but the most famous must be the sacrifice of Isaac but I find it hard to see how that disturbing story really prefigures or explains the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. While it’s obvious that the Gospel is something new, equally it is something that grew out of older narratives. Jesus has very little in common with King David and was not the conventional Messiah that parts of the Old Testament seemed to expect but he saw himself as bringing in a new age which he called the Kingdom of God and which we can see is the genuine and lasting Promised Land; a society in which humanity is totally aligned with the will of God. As Jesus says in the
synagogue at Capernaum, quoting Isaiah; “that age and that kingdom have arrived”.
We look to the scriptures both Old and New Testaments for prophecy and inspiration, to learn from them what it is that God would have us do; how, in other words, we should set abouther perfecting, the promise of a Kingdom of God. Fulfilling the scriptures is not therefore a literary exercise; it’s of vital interest to all of us.
How should we apply all this to the stories of Elisha?
There are some clear parallels with Jesus’ ministry in the stories we heard this evening. The magical jar of oil reminds us in quantity if not quality of the water turned to wine at the wedding feast. Jesus concern for a widow’s plight and for foreign women is striking in the Gospel- think of his willingness to talk to the Samaritan woman at the well and, as we heard this morning, cure the Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter. We hear something of that in Elisha’s acceptance of hospitality from the Shunamite woman. That she should implore Elisha’s help by seizing his feet – regarded as an intimate part of the body reminds us of both the haemorrhaging woman who touches Jesus clothes and perhaps also of Mary Magdalene’s anointing of Jesus feet (and clinging to him in the resurrection garden). Elisha’s somewhat abrupt “What do you want?” is similar to Jesus’ frequent terseness. The idea of healing from afar and sending out to the miracle worker recur in the Gospel.
I shouldn’t overdo the parallels, nor ignore the differences between Elisha’s and Jesus’ miracle working. With one rather notable exception (concerning a young woman), there are no miraculous babies in the Gospels but the Old Testament is peppered with elderly primaegravidae. Elisha is a man of the world; he wanders about like Jesus, but has connections in high places which he’s prepared to use to promote the Shunamite’s husband. Jesus’ relations with the establishment were not cordial.
But most significant, I think, is the manner in which miracles are achieved. Very rarely does Jesus use other than his voice to bring about the miraculous event and sometimes, as with the Centurion’s servant or the haemorrhaging woman, not even his voice. The spittle mud in the man born blind’s eyes is exceptional; usually it is enough that the sufferer says that she or he wants to be healed or to see. In contrast, Elisha sends his magic rod and then has, literally, to resuscitate the dead boy.
Jesus’ vocal miracles and those achieved by mere faith are a significant shift and sort of fulfilling of the earlier stories. Jesus is different from Elisha, the man of God; he claims to be the Son of God. Whatever that means it is plainly an aspect of the incarnation; in the human Jesus, God is himself active in the world. That world was created at God’s word and it is a realisation of God’s mind. Miracles are a small tangible aspect of that mind at work, and they
need no gimmicks or wands to come about; they are God’s response to our faith that the corruption of creation and the ills of physical existence can be cured. They also tell us that the apparently other worldly idea of the Kingdom of God can be achieved on this earth; we have only to believe that it can be and act on that belief for it to happen.
God and Jesus, have left the building or perhaps just the repair, of the Kingdom of God, in our hands; but we are not left alone. In another strange fulfilment of scripture, we heard in our reading from Acts how the Spirit of God, named at the start of Genesis as blowing aimlessly or the primordial waters, is now at work in the Aegean blowing Paul unexpectedly over to Greece where he sets to work fulfilling the expectations of the infant Christian communities there. It’s at work here too as unpredictable and yet as reliable as ever, if we are prepared to trust it and let it inspire us to do the work we have been empowered to do. Amen