Elijah, Ahab and Jezebel-bet you all who’s good and who’s bad in this story from the outset. Elijah went down in history as superstar prophet and religious icon for the ages. He was so popular that Jesus himself was believed to be the reincarnation of Elijah. Ahab, the King of Israel, like his namesake in Moby Dick, was an obsessive, power-hungry king who put personal and political gain above morality and compassion. And, of course, Jezebel, whose very name has become synonymous with all that is conniving and duplicitous, corrupt and vengeful.

But rather than relying our name-based caricatures of these three, let’s spend a little time unfolding a bit of the story leading up to today’s reading. We’re gonna have a bit of bible study this morning, so if you want to go home and read it for yourself sometime, the story of these three begins 1 Kings, chapter 16, and continues through the end of the first book of Kings. But I’m just going to remind us of the events leading up to and in today’s reading.

We begin with King Ahab, leader of the Jewish kingdom, who had his attention always on political gain instead of faithfulness. For this reason, he married Jezebel, a princess from the neighboring kingdom of Phoenicia. For his new queen, Ahab erected temples to the god Baal and goddess Asherah, and Jezebel herself installed four hundred prophets in each temple. Under this influence, the people of Israel began to worship these other idols. Those who remained faithful to Yahweh were persecuted, and the poor were neglected and abused.

Enter Elijah, alone in his dedication to Yahweh, and called by God to single-handedly denounce these other gods and restore the people to faithfulness. So we’ve got one guy going against a megalomaniac king and a powerful queen, against eight hundred other prophets, and a crowd of citizens. Elijah’s got a pretty big task on his hands. Add to that the bounty Ahab put on his head, and I think we’re safe in labeling him as stressed.

Elijah and Yahweh arrange a contest, a sort of divine superbowl to win back the affections of the people. It went down like this: Elijah and the Baal prophets each erected an altar to their god, and prayed for the divinity to light the fire on the altar and send rain down to end a three-year drought. The Baal prophets danced and shouted and carried on, even cutting themselves and spilling their own blood, yet Baal remained silent. Then, with just one word from Elijah, Yahweh brought fire from heaven and rain clouds on the horizon. Yahweh’s power, but more importantly, Yahweh’s attention and compassion are revealed to the gathered crowd. Unlike Baal, Yahweh is a God who cares. In the words of one commentator, “The problem with Baal is not just that he is distant and removed, but that he does not speak or feel or act or care. … Yahweh listens to Elijah’s prayers and responds to them. … Yahweh is one who is active in human affairs, who listens, speaks and acts, and who honors commitments.”* Yahweh is the god who cares, and therefore the only god worthy of our worship. God not only can provide the things we need, but God will.

It’s a wonderful, tender, triumphal moment, as Yahweh’s compassion literally rains down and the people return to God. I wish we could jump from this moment to the moment of compassion Randy read in today’s scripture. That’s another beautiful story of God’s compassion, isn’t it? Sometime after this showdown, the exhausted Elijah declares that the stress has gotten to be too much, that he is too fatigued to go on. His life is in danger, so he flees into the desert, lays down under the broom tree to sleep and to die. But our God does not abandon him. The angel comes and tends him, protecting him in his sleep and occasionally awakening him to offer food and water. Anyone who has ever suffered through a bad case of the flu knows the comfort of someone waiting at your bedside while you sleep, rousting you just enough to pour a sip or two of hot soup down your throat, to stave off weakness. God tends to Elijah like a loving mother to a sick child, replenishing his strength and restoring him from exhaustion. Just as God demonstrated compassion and concern in dramatic style by sending fire and rain to the people, God demonstrates tender, intimate care for the prophet who has served him loyally.

God not only can provide the things that we need, but God will. I love this beautiful image of God’s tender care.
As I said, I wish we could just skip from one story of God’s compassion to the other, but in between, in just a few short verses, something very disturbing happens, something we would probably rather pretend isn’t there. In fact, in the life of the church, we usually do pretend it isn’t there-the lectionary selections jump from the triumph at the altar to chapter 19, verse 4, where Elijah collapses under the tree. But the reason that Elijah is running out into the desert, the reason he surrenders to fatigue, the reason he calls upon God to take away his life, is not because he is exhausted from the showcase at the altar, but because of what happened in between. The crowd, transformed in Yahweh’s favor and jubilant at the end of the drought, rounded up the Baal prophets and brought them to Elijah. Elijah responded by slaughtering them, all 800, one by one, and threw their bodies in a gully. Elijah flees because Ahab has just informed Jezebel of the murder of the prophets, and she has vowed to respond by slaughtering Elijah.

This act of violence is unsettling. It cannot be explained away, nor can it be justified. What are we to do with this bloodshed sandwiched between two stories of God’s compassion and caring for humanity? Many people are quick to assume that this is evidence of the much-maligned “God of the Old Testament,” a God described as vengeful and wrathful. While Deuteronomy does have a law calling for dangerous false prophets to be stoned, this part of the biblical text offers no reference to that law and no evidence that God ordered Elijah to slaughter the prophets. Moreover, the stories of compassion surrounding this act actually go to great lengths to show just the opposite, that God is not vengeful and wrathful against the people, but loving and tender toward humanity.

Perhaps, then, this is an uncontrolled outburst from Elijah, whose own temper and desire for revenge against his enemies overcame him in the moment he slays those prophets. That would mean that when Elijah flees to the desert and lays down to die under the broom tree, he is running from a disaster created by his own sin. Maybe Elijah lost his cool and made a mess of things, and runs away out of a mixture of guilt, shame and fear. While this is a plausible explanation, if Elijah went on trial for the murder of these 800 souls, the biblical text certainly does not give enough evidence to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt. There is no explicit condemnation from Yahweh, and Elijah goes down in history as a hero.

So maybe it’s a third option: neither Elijah nor God wanted to slaughter the prophets, but it was the only defensive action possible to save the people of Israel. Maybe Elijah and Yahweh had no choice, the prophets were so zealous they would not stop until Yahweh vanished from Israel. But again, we don’t have enough evidence to convict the prophets, either-we do know that Jezebel was killing off Yahweh’s followers, but the prophets themselves are described as limping after their ordeal trying to summon Baal at the altar.

In the end, there is no clear place to affix the blame for the murder of these 800 prophets. Perhaps that’s why we rarely hear this part of the story. The violence just hangs there, interrupting the beautiful picture of the heroic prophet and compassionate God. It cannot neatly be justified, rationalized or explained away.

So why mess around with the tradition? Why go against the lectionary to bring up this unpleasantness, this slaughter that makes us all a bit uncomfortable? In part, because it’s there. The Bible is our book, not in part but the whole thing-the parts we don’t like as much as the ones we do-and it’s just plain dishonest to whitewash biblical stories, to turn them from rated R to rated G for Sunday mornings. Because you know what? Life itself is not rated G. Our lives cannot be neatly understood and rationalized and categorized as good or bad, black and white, and real human beings are not caricatures-no one is simply a saint or a sinner, hero or villain, Elijah or Jezebel.

Because that is the reality of life, I believe that this story, in its entirety, violence and all, gives us more good news rather than less. When Elijah falls apart under that broom tree, he is broken down, exhausted, discouraged and fearful for his life. Maybe he is an innocent victim, afflicted by outside forces over which he has no control. Or maybe he is not so innocent, maybe he is guilty of killing the prophets and his sin has brought this disaster upon himself. But the good news of this story is that whether Elijah is in the right or in the wrong or, like most of us, someplace in between, God’s compassion does not fail him. And that means there’s hope for us too. When God promises to walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death, it does not depend on how we got there. Now God might not come along and fix it, make it all better-Elijah goes on to wrangle with Ahab and Jezebel again and again-but God’s commitment to us is unbreakable, and God’s compassion is unfailing.

No matter what kind of mess we are in or how we got there, God will not abandon us to cope with it on our own. Yahweh is the God who cares. Not only can God provide for our needs, but God will. If you are weighed down in life by burdens not of your making-an illness, the bad economy, the loss of a loved one, enemies that are undermining you-trust that God hears your cries. Like a loving father tends a sick or brokenhearted child, God’s vigilant compassion comes without pause. If what afflicts you right now in life has somehow been brought on by your own mistakes or sins-a broken relationship, a bad decision, an angry outburst or selfish desire-God’s comfort is here for you as well. God’s forgiveness is everlasting, and like a loving mother tends the wounds of a wayward child, God will care for you.

The good news from the story of Elijah is that God’s compassion, as evidenced at the altar and under the broom tree, does not depend upon our goodness, but comes to us tenderly and without ceasing. It is that knowledge that gives us the courage to lay claim to those words in the 23rd Psalm, to proclaim them in faith even when we are at our most weary and broken:

* Birch, Brueggemann, Fretheim & Petersen, A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 272.

Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword.  Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.”  Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there.

But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree.
He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”  Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep.  Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.”  He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water.  He ate and drank, and lay down again.  The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”  He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.