The Feast of St Elijah

The feast of St Elijah is a very popular celebration among the Russians. The first church built at Kiev, during the reign of Igor, was dedicated to this Old Testament saint. St. Olga, after her conversion, had a shrine dedicated to him built. Obviously the spectacular end of his life, when he was taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot, is one of the greatest events of the Old Testament. No wonder the reaction to that event, even centuries and millennia later, is of awe. We want to celebrate it. But like Elisha, we want more; we want to experience the graces of Elijah and to bring them into our lives. This is manifested in the way cars, bikes, wagons, and any other vehicle which can be brought to the celebration, are blessed by a priest in the Byzantine tradition.

There is more to Elijah than meets the eye. There always was. He was a wild prophet, ever-embraced by the Word of God, prevailing upon his people to worship Yahweh in purity and truth. To many, he must have looked insane; even those, like the widow of Zarephath, who treated him with kindness and gave as much as they could, questioned him and his mission. When her son died, she believed she was being punished through him, and he was sent to her by God as a curse. But the miraculous power which God worked through him time and again rewarded the widow for her charity. “Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried to the LORD, “O LORD my God, let this child’s soul come into him again.’ And the LORD hearkened to the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived. And Elijah took the child, and brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and delivered him to his mother; and Elijah said, ‘See, your son lives.’ And 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‘” (1Kings 17:20-24). Tradition would suggest that there is something Trinitarian about Elijah’s action here; it was only after the third time that he stretched himself before the dead child that he was free to invoke the Lord and ask for the child to be brought back from the dead.

And it is as a prophet, living in the wilderness, away from the powers that be in Israel, calling the people of Israel to repent, that he was to typify John the Baptist. “Incarnate angel and summit of the prophets, second forerunner of the coming of Christ, glorious Elijah sent down grace from on high to the Prophet Elisha. He heals diseases and cleanses the leprous. He pours healings on all who honour him” (Troparion of Elijah). The Word of the Lord, the Logos, had totally taken Elijah over. “And the word of the LORD came to him” (1Kings 17:2). While not the incarnation of the Logos, the Logos spoke through him, acted through him, did wonders through him. And Elijah bent his will and did what he was told, no matter how difficult or foolish it might have seemed. It makes it easy for us to see how Elijah was, and must be seen as, a messenger or “angel” of the Lord. What the Lord would do centuries later, we see already being done with this wild and crazy prophet. No wonder some would think Jesus was Elijah come back to the earth. But it is because he only acted upon the Word and pointed to the Word, but was not the Word, that he was an image of John the Baptist.

It is also for this reason that Elijah and John could only be prophets of judgment, and not as the givers of grace. They prepared the way of the Lord. They revealed sin where it was at. They showed the world what must be cut off. Elijah showed the devastation that idolatry brings us (we must not assume that it is only Baal which must be stamped out). The drought in Israel is the drought in the soul which has not learned to fully lean upon the Lord but leans on something else for its spiritual support (money, power, fame, et. al). It is better to live in the wild than to fall into sin. Society can taint souls and bring one down with its sinful structures if one accepts them without question. Either they must be torn down, or we must face the consequences of sin. That is as far as the two forerunners could go; they can point out and declare sin, show its destructive, self-immolating nature. They can tell people to stop. But they can’t overturn the guilt of the past. They could not heal what was once destroyed. They could not grant forgiveness of sins. That, they both understood, was for the one to come: Jesus Christ.