Limping with Two Opinions

1 Kings 18:20-40

Okay. This is going to be a doozy. The phrase "limping with two opinions" leaped on my back and bit my neck like a lion taking down a zebra.

I’m almost never willing to take the Bible in a literal sense, but for the first time I felt a shudder of revulsion at the thought of trying to manufacture a metaphorical meaning for the story of Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal. Not literal, but not metaphorical either, but stuck in the hard place between them.

This made me remember our practice at the Waystead of seeking the ‘third option’. Here is what I said about it in another article: “One of the most important guiding principles we have developed is what we call “the third option.” This is very useful in the times when we have become stuck in between two alternatives and feel that we have no other choices available. The discipline of the third option is to actively think outside that ‘either-or’ box, and look for a solution that ‘changes the rules’ in a way that adds to our freedom. We usually know when we have found the third option because we get a feeling of relief, and we often break out in laughter at the grace and aptness of the answer we find.”

So, how do I find the third option in my struggle to understand this story? First, I’m going to back off and ask myself what the story is about. The first thing that popped into my head is that it is about a power struggle, but not exactly. You’ve got a king, Ahab, who is an insecure narcissistic sociopath (ring any bells?) and a prophet, Elijah, who alternates between hiding for his life in gullies and caves out in the desert and coming into town to yell at people about what idiots they are. Ahab can’t think of anything worse to call him than, “troubler of Israel.” So it isn’t really a power struggle, because Elijah doesn’t want to take power for himself. Maybe it’s a reality struggle.

‘Reality struggle.’

Whoops! A sudden wild sideways mental flapping skitters past a memory of Dr. Who saying “doesn’t see me……doesn’t see…..” in his sleep, and later begging Clara to “just see me,” after his last regeneration. And then, seconds later, while imagining fire falling from heaven, another abrupt cerebral crow-hop lands on the phrase “my heart burns within me…” A bible search leads to Psalm 39: “I held my peace to no avail; my distress grew worse, my heart became hot within me. While I mused, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue…”

What the hell do I mean by “reality struggle” anyway? I’ve felt something like a paralyzed astonishment at how people can look at an obvious event or situation and not even see it, but instead see something that can only be called a delusion. So as metaphors go, in terms of a reality struggle, Elijah is trying to get people to “just see.”  Is Elijah feeling that same paralyzed astonishment, as he struggles to get people to open their eyes and see the way things really are, instead of the way they wish they were?

So how am going to go about describing the process that leads to suddenly seeing reality? Well, perhaps it might go like this…..

First, something or someone taunts and dares you, and you are stung into taking the dare, because you are so certain you are right.

This avatar of uncertainty says, “You and me will sacrifice the same thing, you on your altar, and me on mine, and we’ll see!” What is it, do you suppose, this offering? A bullock is described several times in the bible as a ‘sin offering’ and of course there’s always that old Golden Calf that caused so much trouble for Moses. But let’s suppose this is meant to be a sacrifice of expiation, a plea for forgiveness.

Then this raven-fed wild man of doubt says, “Build an altar,” and lets you go first. It’s too late to back out, and so you build it. Halfway through you realize that you’ve had to build your altar from scratch, starting from nothing. He stands next to the ruins of a different altar, an altar you know, an altar that you demolished because at the time you didn’t notice that you cared. Only then do you start to wonder if someone persuaded you to knock it down for no other reason except that they wanted something from you.

Then this jester of judgment plants his feet firmly among the broken altar’s reproachful stones and lets you pray all day, and cut yourself bloody while he watches. He starts taunting you, wondering if your god has wandered away, or is meditating, or gone on a journey, or maybe just needs to be woken up from a nap. No matter what you do, how desperate you become, your altar doesn’t answer; reality will not align with your notions.

Then this clown of clarity makes you nervous by rebuilding his altar with the self-same stones that form your innermost identity, the bedrock of your history. You didn’t notice this until he began to lift them out of the rubble and mortar them tenderly into place. He adds insult to injury by pouring water all over the wood on his altar. (Uh, yeah, water ---- its spiritual symbolism is that of cleansing, and baptism, and its psychological implication leans toward the Jungian symbol for the unconscious.)

Do you suppose the prophetic point might be that no matter how hard you try to alter reality, reality just sits there being real? Do you suppose that no matter how many times you say, “That’s unbelievable,” or “That’s impossible,” to some event that you wish hadn’t happened, it will still be there looking back at you with implacable disinterest? Do you suppose that your face might be getting rubbed in the fact that no matter how much water of denial gets poured over reality, it won’t change a single thing?

Now we come to the fire. Fire symbolizes wisdom and knowledge across many cultures. So this weirdo from the wastelands is saying, “See, no matter how hard I try to stop it, the reality of the divine will pour down and burn up your foolish misconceptions in the fire of understanding. No matter how much you try to pretend that you are sacrificing something real over there on your altar of political posturing, no fire of understanding will fall, because it can’t. Your whole foundation is false, your dogma is devious, and your religion is just a cunning con."

Then the fire falls from above onto the altar of actuality, and deceit dies in a bare instant; delusions shrivel into ash; and false power wilts in the furnace of fact.

Then this connoisseur of compassion leads you away, down to a river named (*) “Tangle,” or “Twisty,” so that you can know beyond a shadow of a doubt just how ensnared in untruth you’ve been. Then he mercifully puts you out of your misery, and leaves you blinking in the bare light of a new day, with the carcasses of all your delusions, your misconceptions, and your fallacies lying naked and lifeless at your feet.

It isn’t an accident that Jesus kept on telling people that they had to die and be reborn in order to enter the Realm of God.

Maybe that is what a prophet is, at least some of the time: a murderer of misunderstandings; a destroyer of delusions; an assassin of aberrations. Maybe it will always be hazardous for us to come too close to the absolute clarity of their vision, their furious torrent of truth. Still, what do we have to lose but the foolish philosophies that we think our lives depend on? Let’s die and find out.

(* The name Kishon may mean Catcher, Place Of Catch (or rather Place Of Ensnarement), or Bender). For the meaning of the name Kishon, NOBSE Study Bible Name List goes with the original idea of the root-verb(s) and reads Bending. Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names also is attracted to the original meaning of the root and reads Tortuous, Winding About.)