1 King 17:17-24; Galatians 1:11-19; Luke 7:11-17
A Missionary God, Yet Present to All
Looking deep down into one’s soul can sometimes be discomforting and scary because not everything therein is pleasant to see. The moments of silent introspection recall more of the negatives than the positives; one realizes the lapses, the unfaithfulness to God and human beings, not to mention missed opportunities to do good and be reconciled with one’s foes, real or imaginary. How true the saying of the Psalmist: “O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways” (Psalm 139:1-3). And, “If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared” (Psalm 130:3-4).
One such example of discomfort with sin is that of the book of Genesis 3. A God who takes pleasure in working alongside his creatures comes to pass time with Adam and Eve, only to realize their absconsion: their act of disobedience chases them from God’s company. This flight from God, on account of sin, remains a reality even today. Our first reading insinuates it, when the widow of Zarephath, Sidon, attributes the death of her son, to the visit of Elijah, the man of God.
An unknown man, Elijah, comes into the life of a widow, who perhaps was struggling with the death of a husband and searching for strategy to survive a brutal future without a husband, her real source and guarantor of sustenance, faces a second tragedy, the loss of an only son. Whatever remained of her collapsed world, consequent upon the death of her husband, disappears into thin air with the loss of the only hope and anchor to life she could count on, her son. In her brokeness and humanness, one fact left to contemplate was her sinful life being responsible for her collapsed life. In her words, “Why have you done this to me, O man of God? Have you come to me to call attention to my guilt and to kill my son?” As far as was concerned, Elijah came to punish her for her sins against God. What a guilty conscience indeed!
The drama of our first reading, like the drama of Adam and Eve, is the fact that no one can abscond from God, for every creature has the breath and presence of God within it. So, even with their flight from God, Adam and Eve could still hear him in the cool of the day, calling out to them in their hiding place! Even as far as the Sidonian town of Zarephath, a widow too comes to terms with God, a Jewish God. In fact, there is no hiding place before a living God – that is the story of Elijah.
Still within the dramas of Adam and Eve, the widow of Zarephath, and the widow of Nain, in today’s gospel, there is a constant reality – God is alive! To display that he is alive, living and active, God intervenes in human lives and history to manifest his presence. Contrary to a condemnatory God, he sustains life, when life is threatened, because he is the author of life. In truth, Adam and Eve absconded with God and not away from God – God’s breath of life in them meant they never departed from him. So, to sustain their lives, he sewed dresses for them against a hash weather (Genesis 3:21). What a loving God!
A close look at the readings of today shows an attribute of God – a missionary God, who is ever present to his people. One of the errors of the widow of Zarephath is to have thought that the absence of a husband is the end of life! Life is a gift of God and only God can sustain it. Although she never encountered the Hebrew God before, she now does through his prophet, Elijah. A world she thought had crashed because her husband died, and now her son followed suit, is restored because of the-man-of-God. But beyond the-man-of-God, Elijah, is God himself. For, “Elijah” means my-God-is-alive. The long and short of life is the recognition that God is alive and he lives in us. By creating us, he is a missionary who comes to dwell in us and live with us. By restoring our brokenness, he makes our journey through live his own journey.
What more, when God visits with us, he does not come to condemn us, but to restore us. Consequently, the second mistake of the widow of Zarephath was to have thought that God came to punish her through the presence of the prophet Elijah. As we have seen, the presence of Elijah was double blessings: 1) she and her son were preserved from starvation, and 2) her son was brought back to life, from the the dead!
It is Luke, in today’s gospel, who realizes these two attributes of God – a missionary and a presence. The widow of Nain meets Jesus on her way to bury her dead son, but Jesus’ visit restores her son to life and returns him to her. What did the crowd say? “A great prophet has arisen in our midst, and God has visited his people” (Luke 7:16). When God visits, as a missionary, he restores every brokenness. In today’s gospel, a woman whose life was already shattered by the social norm of the day, which treated widows as nobodies, could not be abandoned by a God whose attribute is life, especially when he visits only to sustain life! To be alive, then, is to have God. To have an anchor with which to weather the storm of life is to be Elijah – the realization that my-God-is-alive. All the support systems one could garner from human beings peel off and wear away compared with God’s presence and sustenance.
When we read today’s gospel in conjunction with our first reading, it becomes clear to us that God’s missionary visits to us, in whatever form they take, is fundamentally to bless and sustain us, rather than coming to punish us for our sins. Every visit of God, in the New Testament, from the visit of angel Gabriel to Mary and Elizabeth, to Jesus’ visit to Nain today, brings blessing and protection. Yes, even the visit of angel Gabriel to Zachariah in the temple brought a blessing because the promise-child, John the Baptist, was given to him!
If Elijah, in our first reading today, makes possible the attributes of a missionary God by going to the widow of Zarephath, and by being God’s presence to her in the restoration of her son from death to life; if Jesus, in today’s gospel, is God’s missionary to the town of Nain and God’s presence to the widow of Nain by restoring her dead son to her alive; our second reading today emphasizes God’s perennial need, in every age, of missionaries to his people, especially the down trodden and those on the fringes of the society. Paul’s missionary call and apostleship underscores a missionary beyond frontiers. To hear today that Paul went to Saudi Arabia, of all places, the present day seat of Islam, challenges the concept of mission today and what God’s presence can do, when a missionary becomes an Elijah – my-God-is-alive.
Furthermore, when our life appear to be crashing and caving in, instead of dwelling on our past mistakes and sin as the root causes of the problem, we can can focus on God’s imminent visit to us to bring us restoration. In fact, for African Christians of today, who think that enemies are all over the place and plotting their downfall, it is high time we contemplated God’s presence to us and claim for ourselves a God who is alive and active all every circumstances of our lives.
For you and me, the Elijahs, Jesuses and Pauls of today, at least, we can do one thing, taken from the Dalai Lama: “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if we can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” God’s visitation neither destroys nor condemns, it heals, restores and keeps alive. Which presence of God are you to others, and what missionary face of God do you present to others?
Assignment for the Week:
Can you work or act to save life instead of kill it this week? Possibly, can you protest and defend life against abortion, poverty and euthanasia?