2 Kings 2:1–12
The stories concerning Elijah and Elisha in Holy Writ are so vivid and shocking that they have quite disproportionately occupied the attention of preachers and other storytellers for centuries. Elijah is fed by ravens, as he hides from his enemies (1 Kings 17:2–16). Elisha sends bears to maul a large group of boys after they have mocked him (2 Kings 2:23–24). Elijah raises a widow’s son from the dead (1 Kings 17:17–24). Elisha makes the head of an axe float (2 Kings 6:1–7). And then this story of Elijah’s “spirit” and Elisha’s desire to inherit “a double share” of it, a request that is followed by such a startling image that it has been exploited even by conspiracy theorists and others with vivid fictive imaginations: a “chariot of fire” drawn by “horses of fire” appears, forcing the prophets apart, and Elijah, not in any obvious way dying, departs, taken away into the sky by a “whirlwind.” It is no surprise that scholars inclined to imagine the literary history of the Old Testament in terms of cultural evolution would put these stories in primitive Israel, when it still operated in the shadow of animism. And even now, in “enlightened Western Civilization,” the faithful are tempted to think of “spirituality” as quantifiable, due to large or small amounts of some divine stuff deposited in one’s “heart.”
Perhaps as an antidote to this imagination, it would be helpful to consider a New Testament story not entirely unlike this one, namely, the story of the “Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17), James and John, who asked Jesus to give them seats of honor, one on his right and the other on his left, once Jesus had come to power (10:35–45).
James and John do not come off well in this story. They not only seem to be impervious to the message of the gospel proclaimed by the Jesus of Mark, thinking it is about the triumphal rise to power of Jesus and his crew—perhaps after a bloody war for apocalyptic supremacy. They also fail to understand Jesus’s caveat before directly addressing their request. “James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.’ And he said to them, ‘What is it you want me to do for you?’ And they said to him, ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory’” (35–37). This request is not in every respect different from the one of Elisha to Elijah—but situated in the gospel, the reader (or hearer) immediately wonders how these brothers could be so blind to what Jesus has again and again demonstrated, that to enter into the gospel is to serve, not to be served.
Jesus’s response, a direct accusation of and challenge to their foolishness, bounces off their hard hearts: “‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?’” (38). And they, fools who refuse to admit that they do not know what they are asking, quickly reply that they are able. “To drink the cup” that Jesus drinks, recalls the eucharist around which would have gathered the little Galilean village assemblies, the ones that first attended to the performance of the gospel. “Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (14:23–24). “To be baptized with the baptism” with which Jesus is baptized also alludes to the crucifixion of Jesus (cf. Romans 6), just as it does at the very first chapter of Mark (1:9–11), where the baptism of Jesus is to be heard as the overture of the gospel as a whole, a reminder at the very beginning that Mark is “a passion narrative with an extended introduction” (Martin Kähler), a narrative of the crucifixion/resurrection of Jesus and a call to us to follow him to the same end (cf. Mark 8:34–38).
James and John do not understand what Jesus says to them, just as we so often fail to lean hard into the gospel, to hear it with open hearts, with loving minds. “They replied, ‘We are able’” (39). And so, Jesus tells them they will take in the bloody cup of the eucharist and be taken in by the bloody water of baptism, that is, that they will set out on the Via Delarosa, the way to and of the cruciform life that the gospel calls them to live; “but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared’” (40). That is, to lean hard into the Good News is to lean hard into crucifixion, but without any confidence that the result of doing so will be honorable. Honor is as radically recast as is glory or salvation or life or any other term prominent in the telling of the gospel.
And so, whatever is to be understood by the stories of Elijah and Elisha, either for Ancient Israel or for a little local 21st century church, it must not be understood in such a way that the revolutionary call to the New Jerusalem becomes a call to possession, either of spiritual or of other goods. The holiness of the New Covenant is entails a glory that “passeth understanding,” that ruptures old wineskins and conceptual categories, that sends every child of the gospel to expend their lives, that calls us to love concretely, day to day, as Jesus loved, as God in Christ has love and always will love us
Just want to say... fantastic.