Text: 1 Kings 17:17-24 (Luke 7:11-17)                                                              W 3^rd Sunday after Pentecost

“Give Me Your Son”

            In the name of him whose words are Spirit, Truth, and Life, dear friends in Christ:  Today’s Scripture readings include two important firsts.  In the Old Testament lesson, we have the Bible’s first account of a resurrection from the dead.  There we heard how the Lord worked through the prophet Elijah to hand death its very first defeat since the fall of man into sin placed the entire world under its curse.  And then in this morning’s Gospel lesson, we have the record of the first time the Lord Jesus – the one who would conquer the curse for us all – personally brought back a person from the clutches of death.  And we see a noteworthy difference in the two stories:  whereas Elijah goes through a fairly elaborate ritual and prays fervently to God to bring about the restoration to life, Jesus merely speaks to the corpse being carried out of town on the bier and the young man comes alive.  The contrast makes quite clear who is merely the prophet and who is himself the Lord and giver of life.

The differences in the stories aside, however, it’s interesting to note that in both of these first case resurrections, the person raised up from death is the only child – specifically the only son – of a widowed woman. As veteran students of Scripture we know that this similarity is very likely more than just a happy coincidence and that it signals that somehow the events are related on a deeper level than just the obvious fact that both deal with bringing dead people back to life. We suspect that that God has a message here for us.  And inasmuch as it is said that the New Testament is in the Old concealed, and the Old Testament is in the New revealed, this morning I’d like to take a closer look at the first story to see what light in sheds on the second – and indeed, on the entire life and ministry of the Lord Jesus.

            Our story begins, we are told, “After these things”, which pretty much begs the question, “What things?”  So let’s put the story into historical context.  It takes place in Israel during the time of the divided kingdom.  The ten northern tribes had rebelled against the house of David that ruled over Judah in the south and set up their own country.  And whereas Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem, sometimes had good kings and sometimes had bad, here in the northern kingdom of Israel it was pretty much one bad king right after another, each one apparently striving to be worse than his predecessor – and succeeding.  Currently on the throne was a man named Ahab who was, at least with respect to his faithfulness to the Lord and matters of ethics and morality, by far the worst of the bunch to date.  He was, however, an excellent politician.  And one of the things he did to secure his power and increase his fortune was to marry was the daughter of the king of the neighboring country of Sidon.  Sidon was located in roughly what is Lebanon today and was populated by Pagan Canaanites.  It was a costal nation that had made itself fabulously wealthy with its trading fleet that had more or less a monopoly on shipping throughout the entire Mediterranean. So because of Sidon’s wealth and power, it was extremely advantageous for King Ahab to secure an alliance with it through his marriage to the daughter of their king.

            Her name was Jezebel – and she’s the one who made that name a synonym for any especially evil woman.  When she came to live her new husband, she brought with her some 450 prophets of the Canaanite god Baal Hadad, who was usually called just Baal.  In Canaanite religion, Baal was considered the life giver. And in order to appease his wife and make her comfortable, King Ahab built lots of temples and shrines to accommodate the idols of Baal and all the prophets his wife brought.  He even allowed them to set up shop in the temple of the Lord in his capital of Samaria. And thus Baal worship became popular throughout Israel – in fact, it soon far surpassed the worship of the true God.  This is due in part to the sensual nature of Baal worship, which was basically a fertility cult that appealed to people’s baser desires – that is to say, it was all about sex, and sex sells.  There was also the fact that Jezebel actively suppressed the worship of the Lord by persecuting and killing those who wished to remain faithful to him.  So it was through the old carrot and stick approach that Baal supplanted the Lord as the official deity of the northern kingdom.

To deal with this intolerable situation and call his people back to himself, the Lord sent the prophet Elijah to confront Ahab and Jezebel.  And what Elijah told them was this:  since you are intent in turning your backs on the Lord, he’s going to return the favor and turn his back on you.  There will be no more rain in Israel from this day until you are ready to recognize the Lord and him alone as the One True God.  And that was a nice touch, because it just happened that Baal Hadad was the Canaanite god of rain and thunder.  By withholding the rain the Lord wanted to show just how powerless the false god was.

            Now, King Ahab didn’t receive this message too well – not so much because he believed it, he probably didn’t, but more because he was the king after all, and that just wasn’t the proper way to address a king. So he put a price on Elijah’s head, and he went right on worshipping Baal with his wife.  But no matter how much they and their subjects worshipped and prayed to him, there was no rain.  Not a single drop.

Meanwhile, Elijah was getting used to life on the lam.  At first the Lord sent him to hide in a remote ravine where there was a small brook flowing.  Here Elijah laid low and waited.  And the Lord took care of him there.  He had plenty of water to drink and each day ravens came and brought the prophet morsels of bread and meat to eat.  So life was tolerable but far from luxurious.  But as the drought dragged on, eventually the small brook dried up, and Elijah had to find another place to hide.

            So the Lord sent him to the land of Sidon of all places, to a town named Zarephath.  Upon his arrival, Elijah sat down by the city gate, and before long he met a woman who had come to gather sticks for a cooking fire.  Being hungry from his journey, asked her if she would mind putting him up for lunch.  Though a Pagan herself, she recognized him as a holy man – a prophet of Israel’s God – and she told him that under normal circumstances she’d be happy to oblige; but the sad truth was that she only had enough flour and oil in the house for one last meal for herself and her young son.  The drought had taken its toll, and being a poor widow with no means of support and food prices skyrocketing, she was utterly destitute. She had been holding on to a last little bit of food for as long as she could, hoping against hope that something would change for the better; but now she’d given up.  This was the day she planned to make a little bread from her final reserve, eat it with her son, and then wait for death by starvation to come. She said, practically apologizing, that she hoped that Elijah would understand her reluctance to share.  But Elijah told her not to be afraid, and to make him lunch anyway – and make it for him first; and he guaranteed her that the Lord God of Israel would ensure that she did not run out of food for the duration of the drought.

            It was an audacious and seemingly unreasonable request to make of a Pagan woman in desperate need; but despite it all, she believed the promise of God that Elijah spoke and did what he asked.  And God kept his promise:  each day she made bread for Elijah, her son, and herself, and each day there was just enough flour and oil in her containers for her to make it.  She invited Elijah to stay in her home, giving him the upstairs room.  And so together they survived the entire drought that lasted for three whole years.  And there’s a real irony here:  over in Israel, God’s unfaithful people are starving because of a drought that came upon them because of the king’s foolish liaison with a wicked Sidonian woman; meanwhile, here in Sidon, the last prophet of the True God finds refuge from the drought and enough to eat with a now faithful Sidonian woman.  And though it’s ironic, it’s what we would expect:  the Lord punishes his people who turn from him, and rewards even Pagans who turn to him.

            But just when the simple theology of the situation is so clear and everything seems to working out nicely for those whose trust is in the Lord, we get to the part of the story we heard this morning – and it doesn’t seem right.  The widow’s young son contracts what appears to be some kind of severe respiratory infection.  Over a period of days the disease runs its worsening course, leaving the child literally gasping for air.  And then we’re told “his breath left him”.  Death is never easy to bear, but I think that most of us would agree that the worse possible case is when a parent loses a child.  And now this poor widow, who has already lost her husband, not to mention whatever wealth she had, loses the son she holds so dear.  She’s completely brokenhearted – and she’s confused and angry.  Here, she stepped out in faith and did a good thing for the Lord’s cause.  She’s been sheltering and feeding God’s prophet, and she renounced her false gods and turned her trust to the Lord—and this is how he treats her?  He takes her son from her?  It seems so unfair, so wrong.

            So what is going on here?  Well, part of the answer lies in more of the contrast between what’s going on here in the widow’s house and what’s going on over in Israel.  Remember, over there the people are worshipping Baal.  And though he was the Canaanite rain god, the so-called giver of life, he was really something of a fair weather deity.  And what I mean by that is that most of the time people worshiped him by engaging in the sexual excesses I mentioned earlier … most of the time, but not always; and especially not in time of extended drought.  Then the feeling was that Baal was angry and had to be appeased – and the only way to appease him was through human sacrifice. Specifically, children were sacrificed on his altars; and he seemed to have a predilection for male children. So, over in Israel, as the drought dragged on and the people were threatened with starvation, they turned to the prophets of Baal asking, “What, shall we do to bring the rain?”  The prophets of Baal had just one reply:  “Thus says the god Baal, “Give me your sons.”  Oh, and he was happy to take their daughters too.  And so hundreds, perhaps thousands of young lives were being sacrificed on Baal’s altars, as parents – parents whose sacred duty it was to protect their children – willingly handed them over to “the life giver” to die in order to ensure their own survival.  (And if that all sounds unthinkably barbaric, and it should, consider for a moment that in this country children are being sacrificed by the thousands each day by their parents not for survival, but merely to allow them to continue their indulgent lifestyles or in the name of “reproductive rights”. Things really haven’t changed that much.) 

But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the widow of Zarephath, who presumably had formerly been a worshipper of Baal, connects the death of her own son not with some kind of offering to make the rain come, but rather with the guilt of her own sin?  Hugging her son’s lifeless body close to her breast, she bitterly accuses Elijah, “Did you come here to kill my son and remind me of my sin?”  She assumes that God is punishing her for things she has done wrong, perhaps in former days when she was involved in the worship of Baal, or perhaps other sins she committed that weigh heavily on her conscience … and that’s the way it often is, isn’t it?  When tragedy strikes us, one of the first things we think is that the Lord is bringing it upon us as a form of divine retribution.  And in one sense, there’s something that’s correct about that thought:  all human tragedy, and especially death, are indeed the result of sin.  But there is another sense in which it is not true, because the Lord does not treat us as our sins deserve.

            Quite the opposite is true – and that’s what we see in this story.  I mean, first, consider all the good this woman has already received at the Lord’s hand:  God sent the prophet to rescue her and her son from horrible deaths by starvation – and he did that while she was still very much a Pagan lost in sin and darkness.  She seems to have forgotten that now – as indeed we all tend to do when tragedy strikes. But the lesson of the story is that God does so much more than see us through the problems we encounter in this life – his greater goal is to save us from death itself.  

            Elijah tells the grieving mother, “Give me your son.”  Remember, that’s the same thing the prophets of Baal are saying – but they’re taking live children and killing them.  The prophet of the True Life Giver takes the child who is dead and brings him back alive.  And pay attention to how he does it.  First Elijah takes the child up to his dwelling place, his own little chamber, if you will.  There he lays the child on his own bed – the place where he sleeps.  And interceding for the boy’s life, three times he stretches himself out over the child’s body.  It all seems rather peculiar – until you remember that the Old Testament is a picture of things to be revealed – then it begins to make sense.  The prophet’s actions point to what Christ will do. God does not take our sons – he gives us his.  You see how with his own body the prophet covers and hides the boy.  That’s key because the Hebrew word that we usually translate “atonement” actually means to cover.  That’s what Christ did for us on when he was stretched out on the cross: his death covers us up as Jesus intercedes for our sinful lives with his own perfect life.  And I can’t help but think that the three times the prophet does it suggests the three days Christ lay in the tomb – where he lay in the sleep of death in his own dark chamber – and where indeed we who are baptized into his name lay with him in his tomb.

            That’s what Paul wrote to the Romans, “Don’t you know that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were buried with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life.”  And that’s exactly what we see in the story:  the Lord gives the child back his life, and then the prophet returns the boy alive back to his mother.  The truth is that we see this same miracle take place every time we have a baptism here in the church.  God says to parents, “Give me your son” or “Give me your daughter”.  And we hand the child over – a child dead in sin and under the curse of God’s wrath.  And in Baptism the Lord Jesus covers the child (or the adult – it makes no difference) with his own body in his tomb, and then raises the child up to life with him. The person is returned to his or her loved ones with a new life in Christ.

            But that’s only part of what the story points to:  because it also points ahead to a greater fulfillment.  When we suffer what the widow of Zarephath did, when someone we love and care for dies, God tells us the same thing:  “Give me your son, or your daughter, or mother, father, sister, brother, what have you.”  And we turn them over to him knowing that they are covered by God’s Son. We know that he has taken them in his arms up to where he lives; and we know that one day, because God has given us his Son, that he will come back down and return them – all those who are with him – to us who are alive in that day.  We can be sure of it because he truly is the Giver of Life and the Word of the Lord from his mouth is the truth.

            So when you suffer pains and losses, when the burdens of your sins are oppressing you, for whatever you may need in this life or the next, let the request of Elijah to a grieving mother be your prayer to God:  “Father in heaven, give me your Son.”  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!