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too_quietToday’s ten minutes of writing (which turned into a lot more than ten) revolved around my absolute favorite story in the entire Bible. And true to form my favorite Bible story is kind of an obscure one, buried 1 Kings. But it’s so good, so human, and so darn relevant that I feel like it should way less obscure. So here you go. (I’ll put it behind a cut so those of you who are not Bible-inclined can just pass right on by. Also it’s long.)
[Beneath the cut: a retelling of the story of Elijah under the broom tree and what happened after. With a number of asides and a liberal sprinkling of f-bombs, because that’s just how I roll.]
When our story begins, Elijah (yes, THAT Elijah) is the last - the very, absolute last - prophet of the Hebrew God left anywhere on Earth. Elijah has been tasked with bringing the Israelites - currently busy following the far more numerous and apparently far more convincing prophets of Baal - back to God. (One can perhaps imagine these prophets of Baal preaching a lovely prosperity gospel and selling piles of WWBD merch, but I digress …) Elijah has traveled all over and met all kinds of people and performed some of the most impressive miracles in the entirety of the Bible, at one point calling down fire from the sky in front of a whole bunch of people. But after everything, literally the only thing Elijah seems to have succeeded in is ending up with an extremely large price on his head.
(For any of you who are fannish in the Babylon 5 sort of way, the scene in which Jezebel’s messenger catches up to Elijah in order to tell Elijah to get his affairs in order because he is going to be dead in the next 24 hours is highly reminiscent of that scene in Parliament of Dreams where G’Kar’s old rival sends a messenger to tell him that sometime in the next 48 hours, “You will know fear, and then you will know pain, and then you will die.” Anyway.)
Elijah flees as far as Beersheba, at which point he seems to finally hit his breaking point. With a resounding, “You know what? Fuck this,” he leaves his servant in Beersheba, walks out into ‘the wilderness’ (which is a nice euphemism for THE MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING DESERT), parks his ass under a broom tree, and says [and here I’m quoting directly from the NIV translation], “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life.” The task he’s been given is impossible, Elijah is so exhausted he literally has nothing left, and there’s no way out as far as he can see.
And then since God doesn’t seem to have done him any favors so far, Elijah lays down under the broom tree and goes to sleep. After all, if God can’t be bothered to do the job Elijah just begged him to do, a couple of days in the desert without food or water should take care of things.
Okay. All this stuff up to now is just the tragic backstory. It has nothing to do with why this story is my favorite out of all the thousands of stories in the Bible. The reason this story is my favorite is because of how God responds to Elijah.
There’s no eye-rolling. No, “What the actual fuck, Elijah?!” No lectures about faith as small as a mustard seed. No, “And you call yourself a prophet…” And definitely no, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, get up off your pathetic ass, and go do your damn job.”
Nope. None of that.
You know what God does?
God sends an angel with fresh-baked bread and a jug of cool water. The angel doesn’t try to reason with Elijah. Doesn’t lecture him. Doesn’t tell him how much he still has to live for. The angel just sets the meal down by Elijah’s head, touches Elijah on the shoulder and says, “Get up and eat.” And then, presumably, the angel leaves.
This doesn’t seem to be quite the answer Elijah was aiming for, because after he eats and drinks, he just lies right back down under the broom tree.
So God sends the angel back with more fresh bread and more cool water, and this time the angel says to Elijah, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.”
This REALLY doesn’t seem to be the answer Elijah wanted, but at least now he’s annoyed enough at God that he’s given up on dying Right The Fuck Now (spite, incidentally, can make a perfectly good reason for staying alive). Instead, he dusts himself off and marches forty days and forty nights across the desert to Mount Horeb to give God a sizeable piece of his mind.
Which he does. God asks Elijah what he’s doing on God’s doorstep, and Elijah is like, “Now see here God, I have done absolutely everything you asked me to and it’s not enough. I can’t do this by myself. I give up. I’m fucking done.”
So God tells Elijah to go stand outside, and proceeds to put on this whole wind-earthquake-and-fire show, and then shows Godself to Elijah in the stillness that follows.
And at this point, Elijah has clearly had it. He’s like, “Cool, cool, you’re awesome in power and glorious in might and all that. Hooray. Hallelujah. Et cetera. That doesn’t change the fact that I. Can’t. Fucking. Do. This. And also did you miss the part about how there’s a price on my head?”
And again: no lecture, no shaming, no, “look, I’m God and you’ll do this because I said so.”
Nope.
Here’s what God does.
God listens.
And when God is done listening, God gives Elijah a list of powerful people who can help him, reassures Elijah that there are still seven thousand people in Israel who don’t worship Ba’al, and says (more or less), “And by the way, I’ve found an assistant for you. His name is Elisha ben Shaphat, and you’ll find him in a place called Abel Meholah.”
And that’s why this most human of stories is my favorite story in the Bible.
If you’re feeling a little (or a lot) like Elijah right now, I pray your angel with bread shows up very soon.
[Beneath the cut: a retelling of the story of Elijah under the broom tree and what happened after. With a number of asides and a liberal sprinkling of f-bombs, because that’s just how I roll.]
When our story begins, Elijah (yes, THAT Elijah) is the last - the very, absolute last - prophet of the Hebrew God left anywhere on Earth. Elijah has been tasked with bringing the Israelites - currently busy following the far more numerous and apparently far more convincing prophets of Baal - back to God. (One can perhaps imagine these prophets of Baal preaching a lovely prosperity gospel and selling piles of WWBD merch, but I digress …) Elijah has traveled all over and met all kinds of people and performed some of the most impressive miracles in the entirety of the Bible, at one point calling down fire from the sky in front of a whole bunch of people. But after everything, literally the only thing Elijah seems to have succeeded in is ending up with an extremely large price on his head.
(For any of you who are fannish in the Babylon 5 sort of way, the scene in which Jezebel’s messenger catches up to Elijah in order to tell Elijah to get his affairs in order because he is going to be dead in the next 24 hours is highly reminiscent of that scene in Parliament of Dreams where G’Kar’s old rival sends a messenger to tell him that sometime in the next 48 hours, “You will know fear, and then you will know pain, and then you will die.” Anyway.)
Elijah flees as far as Beersheba, at which point he seems to finally hit his breaking point. With a resounding, “You know what? Fuck this,” he leaves his servant in Beersheba, walks out into ‘the wilderness’ (which is a nice euphemism for THE MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING DESERT), parks his ass under a broom tree, and says [and here I’m quoting directly from the NIV translation], “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life.” The task he’s been given is impossible, Elijah is so exhausted he literally has nothing left, and there’s no way out as far as he can see.
And then since God doesn’t seem to have done him any favors so far, Elijah lays down under the broom tree and goes to sleep. After all, if God can’t be bothered to do the job Elijah just begged him to do, a couple of days in the desert without food or water should take care of things.
Okay. All this stuff up to now is just the tragic backstory. It has nothing to do with why this story is my favorite out of all the thousands of stories in the Bible. The reason this story is my favorite is because of how God responds to Elijah.
There’s no eye-rolling. No, “What the actual fuck, Elijah?!” No lectures about faith as small as a mustard seed. No, “And you call yourself a prophet…” And definitely no, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, get up off your pathetic ass, and go do your damn job.”
Nope. None of that.
You know what God does?
God sends an angel with fresh-baked bread and a jug of cool water. The angel doesn’t try to reason with Elijah. Doesn’t lecture him. Doesn’t tell him how much he still has to live for. The angel just sets the meal down by Elijah’s head, touches Elijah on the shoulder and says, “Get up and eat.” And then, presumably, the angel leaves.
This doesn’t seem to be quite the answer Elijah was aiming for, because after he eats and drinks, he just lies right back down under the broom tree.
So God sends the angel back with more fresh bread and more cool water, and this time the angel says to Elijah, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.”
This REALLY doesn’t seem to be the answer Elijah wanted, but at least now he’s annoyed enough at God that he’s given up on dying Right The Fuck Now (spite, incidentally, can make a perfectly good reason for staying alive). Instead, he dusts himself off and marches forty days and forty nights across the desert to Mount Horeb to give God a sizeable piece of his mind.
Which he does. God asks Elijah what he’s doing on God’s doorstep, and Elijah is like, “Now see here God, I have done absolutely everything you asked me to and it’s not enough. I can’t do this by myself. I give up. I’m fucking done.”
So God tells Elijah to go stand outside, and proceeds to put on this whole wind-earthquake-and-fire show, and then shows Godself to Elijah in the stillness that follows.
And at this point, Elijah has clearly had it. He’s like, “Cool, cool, you’re awesome in power and glorious in might and all that. Hooray. Hallelujah. Et cetera. That doesn’t change the fact that I. Can’t. Fucking. Do. This. And also did you miss the part about how there’s a price on my head?”
And again: no lecture, no shaming, no, “look, I’m God and you’ll do this because I said so.”
Nope.
Here’s what God does.
God listens.
And when God is done listening, God gives Elijah a list of powerful people who can help him, reassures Elijah that there are still seven thousand people in Israel who don’t worship Ba’al, and says (more or less), “And by the way, I’ve found an assistant for you. His name is Elisha ben Shaphat, and you’ll find him in a place called Abel Meholah.”
And that’s why this most human of stories is my favorite story in the Bible.
If you’re feeling a little (or a lot) like Elijah right now, I pray your angel with bread shows up very soon.
