A Reflection for Wednesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
The first reading today is a core memory for me. It’s the part where Elijah tells the people to choose between the Lord and Baal, but they refuse. So he sets up a demonstration: He has the priests of Baal choose a bull to sacrifice and cut it up, and Elijah cuts up the other one. They do everything but start the fire to burn up the sacrifice. They call on Baal for hours.
And they hopped around the altar they had prepared.
When it was noon, Elijah taunted them:
"Call louder, for he is a god and may be meditating,
or may have retired, or may be on a journey.
Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened."
This is peak Old Testament sarcasm. I remember when I was younger, I had a Bible comic book and I adored the picture of the chubby, sweaty priests of Baal in their fringed robes, getting increasingly panicky as the day wore on and they could not.
But the comic book Bible of my childhood didn’t portray the next part:
They called out louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears,
as was their custom, until blood gushed over them.
Noon passed and they remained in a prophetic state until the time for offering sacrifice.
But there was not a sound;
no one answered, and no one was listening.
This is pretty gruesome stuff. Imagine the people slathered with blood, calling and praying as they prance around the pile of meat. Imagine the smell of the blood, the sweat, the mounting fear. Imagine the flies that must have come. And imagine what else the daily worship of Baal must have entailed if even the priests were expected to shed blood each time they worshiped.
Sometimes I have wondered why, as popular as this passage is, people don't like to put themselves in Elijah’s place. When Jesus makes a whip of cords and cleanses the temple, for instance, that’s stirring and sensational and maybe even a little bit funny, and so people love to say that if we are to imitate Jesus, there’s always the option of making a whip and tipping over tables. This is an option we like to think about when we’re trying to rid the Church of impurities. We can do as Jesus did in the temple.
But Elijah also does something emotional and showy to persuade the people once and for all that there is only one true God, and the rest (whether it’s Mammon or Baal) has no place in our true worship.
But you’ll notice that Elijah doesn’t go on the attack. Instead, he steps back and lets the priests of Baal do their best and call on their God. He isn’t afraid because he knows, as the passage says, “no one was listening.”
Then Elijah sets up the altar to God and dramatically drenches it in water, saturating the rock so that no earthly fire could set it alight. This is his prayer:
"LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel,
let it be known this day that you are God in Israel
and that I am your servant
and have done all these things by your command.
Answer me, LORD!
Answer me, that this people may know that you, LORD, are God
and that you have brought them back to their senses."
And then miraculously the fire comes and burns it all up, and the people see it and believe. Yes, it’s dramatic; yes, it’s memorable. Yes, it humiliates the vanquished people. But it’s also very clearly all God’s doing. The only thing Elijah does is set the stage and call on God with utter confidence.
Maybe this is why people don’t try to act like Elijah, as melodramatic as this passage may be: Because it’s all about stepping back and letting God do what he wants.
This is a lot harder than charging in and knocking over tables. It's even harder than doing what the priests of Baal did, shedding their own blood for their God. What Elijah did was let God make the sacrifice.
This is what priests do today: They prepare the altar and then they call on God to make the sacrifice happen. Jesus is the one who shed his blood. All we have to do (which is harder than it sounds!) is have confidence in him.
