Daily Devotional • December 30
A Reading from 1 Kings 17:17-24
17 After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. 18 She then said to Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!” 19 But he said to her, “Give me your son.” He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. 20 He cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” 21 Then he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” 22 The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. 23 Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, “See, your son is alive.” 24 So the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”
Meditation
There’s something about this lesson that I find off. The widow and her son have been kept miraculously alive through the famine, and she’s developed this close relationship with Elijah through that, so that when her son dies, she shows no compunction about expressing her fresh grief with an accusation against Elijah—against God only by extension. Elijah’s immediate reaction is to plead to God for the boy and raise him. Then, as if she weren’t sure about it before, his mother now says, “I know you are a man of God,”—the very words she used to accuse Elijah.
Well, it’s pretty easy to believe in someone who brings back your dead child, but it’s also easy to believe in someone who makes food out of the thin air. I could say that here we see the mercy of God in, not just sparing her the loss of the widow’s son, but in building her faith, little by little. Like the boy with five loaves and two fish, she gave her last flour and oil to feed Elijah, and has seen it persist while, surely, she has watched her neighbors starve. But the grief of losing her son threatens to undo that faith.
This makes me wonder: what happens when the next grief comes—as in life, it surely will? Can her faith withstand it? We are not told. This lesson is the last we see of her. We are left asking: if God could show such mercy in her grief, why not everyone’s? Why not mine? For this widow, in this grief, the succor came quickly and in the form easiest to accept. It doesn’t usually, and we are asked to trust in God through the grief, believing in something we don’t know if this Old Testament widow had any inkling of—the resurrection of the dead.
Elizabeth Baumann is a seminary graduate, a priest’s wife, and the mother of two small daughters. A transplant from the West Coast, she now lives in “the middle of nowhere” in the Midwest with too many cats.
♱
Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Diocese of Sekondi – The Church of the Province of West Africa
The Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee