Victory and Revenge: Mendelssohn and Elijah on Carmel I Kings 18

Who does not like to be a winner? The taste of victory is so sweet, to be on top, to be queen of the hill! There are few feelings in life like that moment when you swagger off the court, or out of the boardroom, knowing that you have “killed it,” as the saying now goes. Your smile is broad, your inner joy bubbles over, your arm pumps involuntarily, while your legs threaten to leap off the ground. I aced the test! I have been chosen to give the speech! I have been given the church appointment of my dreams! My bishop chose me to preach at the conference! Lord, it is hard to humble at moments like those.

The dramatic story of the prophet Elijah confronting the pagan priests of Baal on Mount Carmel is among the most dramatic scenes of scripture. It has been portrayed artistically in ways too numerous to recount in picture and word and song. Perhaps the most famous is Felix Mendelssohn’s oft-sung oratorio, “Elijah,” premiered in 1846 at the Birmingham Festival in England. Though the work was composed first with a German text, it was immediately translated into English, the language of the first performance. I have been privileged to sing the role of Elijah several times in my life, and I can attest that it is enormous fun to enact the role of the prophet with full chorus and orchestra. It is immensely vocally satisfying, and a true vocal challenge, to sing the entire piece that runs to 200 pages in the G. Schirmer edition that I have long used.

And of those 200 pages, fully 46 of them, nearly 25%, are given over to the scene of today’s text. Mendelssohn cannily sets the scene with rich and dramatic “tied her to the railroad tracks” music, the chorus playing the parts of the Baal priests, standing over against the lone prophet. It is nothing less than the Super Bowl of prophecy, and Elijah’s snide and clever repartee with the chorus is a delight to sing. The chorus grows louder and louder, with Elijah egging them on, screaming for Baal to answer their cries that he appear and destroy the mocking prophet. But the heavens are silent at the their howling demands, the music punctuated with long rests between their shouts to indicate the inability of Baal to show up.

Finally, Elijah stops the mouths of the priests with a brief and quite beautiful prayer, asking that YHWH come and prove that there is but one God in the universe. In response, YHWH sends fire from the heavens, as Elijah has asked, that licks up the water around the altar and consumes completely the altar and its animal sacrifices. In response to the great miracle, the Baal chorus now becomes the astonished Israelite witnesses. They intone the lovely chorale “Cast thy burden upon the Lord,” just prior to the miracle, and then sing the ferocious chorus describing the terrible descent of the fire from heaven that is immediately followed by, first, their acceptance of YHWH’s singular power by “falling on their faces” and then, second, singing the famous shema of Israel, “The Lord is God, let Israel hear.”

In response Elijah thunders a terrible demand: “Take all the prophets of Baal, and let not one of them escape you. Bring them down to Kishon’s brook, and there let them be slain!” The chorus replies with huge energy, “Take all the prophets of Baal, and let not one of them escape us; bring all and slay them!” Elijah then sings perhaps the most difficult aria in the piece, often cut in performance to save a genuine bass (which I am not) from having to sing the thing! We bass-baritones relish this aria: “Is not His word like a fire?” because it provides ample opportunity to show off both our range and our flexibility. After that tour de force, Mendelssohn tosses in a short aria for alto, quoting Hosea 7:13, “Woe unto them who forsake Him,” providing some sort of rationale for the previous completion of awful vengeance on the enemies of YHWH.

I admit to you quite readily that I have loved singing this piece; it is musically a bit dated now, I suppose, but for sheer pleasure I can think of few pieces I have enjoyed performing more. Having said all that, I now have a confession to make; I find the piece most dreadful theologically, and wish to separate myself from its message completely. As I examine its shape, and its ideas, I feel a certain shame that I have presented it to willing audiences at all.

It simply must be said that it enshrines and celebrates the need for and the joy in vengeance and revenge. Just how can anyone celebrate the cruel and needless demand that Elijah makes of his fellow Israelites to grab all the priests of Baal, numbering 400 we are told, and drag them down to the brook Kishon where there are to be slaughtered (I Kings 18:40)? In fact, Mendelssohn’s librettist somewhat blunts the force of this horror by not repeating what the biblical text says so clearly: it is not the people who murder the prophets of Baal, it is rather Elijah himself! Here is the text: “They seized them and dragged them down to the brook Kishon, and he killed them there.” The verb at the end of the phrase is plainly singular. The sight of Elijah, hip deep in the stream, one by one dispatching those 400 human beings, is a sight too monstrous to gaze at for long.

But lest we think that Mendelssohn has softened the horrors of all this slaughter, in reality he has ironically made it worse! Just prior to the long scene of the defeat and murder of the Baal priests, the chorus sings one of the gentlest and most affecting choruses in the piece, “Blessed are the men who fear Him,” with its wafting repetitions that those who fear YHWH “ever walk in the ways of peace.” Immediately follows the scene at Mount Carmel, and all notions of peace are driven away.

This is nothing less than abhorrent. Too often in the ancient world and in our own, winners imagine that if they are to be true winners they must obliterate and vanquish those whom they have defeated. This tribal mentality must be rejected completely and thoroughly if we are ever to find genuine peace in our world of pain and hurt. It is here that our Bible has not always helped us move beyond such primitive, yet all too current, ideas. However, by noting this enormous problem I am not implying that only in the New Testament and its witness to Jesus do we find the answers for these demands for revenge. After all, we hear this same Jesus accuse his opponents of being “whited sepulchers, full of dead men’s bones,” hardly a pleasant characterization of those with whom he disagrees. And there is always that fearsome Revelation of John, riddled with calls for vengeance from the throne of heaven itself!

The entire Bible has many references to other ways to follow the call of God, and those are to be found in both testaments. Read Hosea 11 for a thorough rejection of the way of revenge, as YHWH refuses to exact such revenge on the people of Israel, though, God knows, they surely deserve it under the old notion of tribal vengeance. And, of course, when Jesus calls for his followers to “turn the other cheek and to pray for those who persecute” he also calls into question the ancient way.

How long, O YHWH! How long must we continue to be enamored with getting even, with sauntering about as victors, lording it over those whom we have defeated? Elijah on Carmel can be no model for us, nor can the snide Jesus of that spot in Luke’s gospel. We must choose carefully whom to follow as we attempt to make our way in this world. The YHWH of Hosea 11 would be a good place to begin, along with the Jesus who calls us to turn to another way, a more excellent way, as his great apostle Paul had it. Come off the mountain of Carmel and live in the world in a new way, a way of love and care for all of God’s creatures. I love to sing “Elijah,” but I do not love the Elijah on Carmel. Neither should you.