Rethinking the notion of a divine gift

A Reflection for Monday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

Today’s Gospel gives us Matthew’s account of Jesus delivering the Beatitudes. Since no one needs to hear my gloss on a passage we have probably all heard preached on a thousand times, I thought it better to focus on the first reading, from 1 Kings. Then I realized I didn’t have the faintest idea what is going on in this story about Elijah.

On the surface, the story obviously offers a lesson on how God provides us with sustenance even in times of scarcity or deprivation: Not for the last time, God saves Elijah from starvation through divine intervention. But it gets more complicated once one moves past these first six verses of 1 Kings 17, because that brook from which Elijah drinks? It dries up—and God sends him on the move again. Though God will continue to miraculously provide for Elijah through the people he meets and the environments he encounters, the Wadi Cherith is no land of plenty for long.

But even more curious is the method by which God provides in this passage: Elijah is brought bread and meat twice a day by ravens. This common bird generally gets a bad rap in Scripture—pace Jesus’ example in Luke 12:24—and is declared ritually unclean  in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Why? Because it is a scavenger, eating carrion and garbage. Note that before Noah sends out a dove to determine if the waters have sufficiently receded after the flood in the Book of Genesis, he sends out a raven; the raven doesn’t return, the implication perhaps being that it found itself quite a feast of dead animals floating upon the waters. Surf and turf! 

To anyone hearing this story who was familiar with Mosaic Law, the presence of ravens as the method by which Elijah is kept alive was surely a startling one. Which brings up an obvious question: What kind of meat are these birds bringing to Elijah? He’s not eating the ravens themselves—an abomination according to Mosaic Law—but is he eating carrion? That, too, is forbidden, says Leviticus; not only can you not eat carrion, you can’t even touch it. 

Elijah is elsewhere not one to hold his tongue when he feels like God has done him a bad turn, so it is not hard to imagine he refused to eat the meat, at least at first. But it keeps him alive. Like our English word “dose,” it is both the poison and the cure, something that can’t be consumed but must be. And it seems to prepare him for even more startling moments of divine intervention later in the tale, ones that in the Christian tradition prefigure the deads of Jesus: A boy is raised from the dead; food miraculously multiplies; the poor and marginalized are miraculously provided for. 

In other words, God uses something abominable and disgraceful to Elijah and his kin as part of Elijah’s preparation for what is to come. Perhaps Elijah was mocked and shunned for taking carrion from unclean birds, and perhaps he himself had to overcome deeply ingrained habits of thinking and living to accept God’s gifts to him. But he takes his medicine, accepts that God’s ways are not his ways; it is perhaps no small thing that in Christian and Jewish traditions, it is Elijah who is often held up as an exemplar of prayerful faith and of waiting patiently for God to communicate the divine will in whatever way God might wish. It is through a still small voice, most famously, but it is also through those ways which strike us as most improbable.

God’s gifts to us might not always come in the most attractive forms. They may even require us to rethink the notion of a divine gift itself. 

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