Elijah was afraid and ran for his life into the desert… He walked forty days and forty nights until he came to the mountain of God. There he crawled into a cave and spent the night. And the word of the Lord came to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
- 1 Kings 19 -
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days
- Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven -
He was the man who stood against a nation. With the king’s price on his head he’d lived in hiding for three long and lonely years, the last survivor of a faithful people. Every corner of the known world had been scoured in search of him, every rock upturned, yet when he needed an audience with the king he happily gave his hiding place away. He was the man at whose word the rains dried up and fire poured down, the man who had outrun and outdistanced chariots, who had breathed life into the lungs of the dead. The last and the greatest of his kind. Yet when we cross Elijah’s path in the desert, he could be called little more than a tired old prophet fleeing the noose. Somehow, despite all that he had seen, all that he had done, it took only a wound-up word from an angry queen to instill fear enough to drive him into the desert. He ran, and he hid. He ran until he couldn’t run anymore, which means he wasn’t drawing from the same source that helped him outrun the king’s chariots. His exhaustion must have been a novel experience. He even begged for death, the most “delightful hiding place for weary men”, as the Greeks called it. He didn’t really want to die; he was just donning the dramatics that help us cope when life gets tough. (If he’d really wanted to die, he only needed to make an appointment with the queen.) And after one day, exactly the amount of time the queen had given him to live, he stopped running, and he looked around. He was still alive. In that shameful moment, sheltering in the shade of his own failing, God caught him up. I don’t know what to make of the way God responds to Elijah’s childishness. In as much as he had run away out of fear, he had actually run away from God himself. And yet God sends an angel to him. More than that, when the angel meets him he doesn’t come with a rebuke, or the hard hand of discipline, but with a warm meal and a word of comfort. “The journey is too much for you”; it is too much, but it is not over, is the angel’s message. Elijah had to go further into the desert. Because an angel wasn’t enough. He had to meet with God.
Elijah might have run a whole day to get away from God, but he would walk forty just to hear him whisper. And that is where we find him, at the mouth of the cave, his cloak over his face, drawn out by the still, small voice of God asking of him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
I might not know what to make of the way God responds to Elijah’s failing faith; I just know that this is the way he responds. It’s the way he always responds to people in hiding. I know it better than I’d like to, since I’ve discovered God’s faithfulness most arrestingly in the times when my faith fails me the most. In those moments of dark and doubting obscurity even someone as superhuman as Elijah can’t seem to shake the most fundamentally human response – to run and hide. It’s the condition to which everyone from the first Adam to this Adam has been subject. We are, all of us, nothing more than “troubled guests on the dark earth”, and too often we choose to veil ourselves in the darkness rather than learn to walk in it. We run, but the Hound of Heaven chases. We hide, only to be sought and saved.
The whisper at the mouth of the cave speaks of the deafening revelation that God seeks hiding people, and invites hiding people to seek. The second of those two things merits some thought, especially by anyone who has known what it feels like to walk in the dark. Shame drives us into hiding, and the grace of God compels us out. And how? With a whisper, and with a question, “What are you doing here?” Though we would have it different, God is usually far more interested in getting us to ask questions, far more interested in drawing us to him in the very midst of our doubt, than he is in offering an answer. That’s because questions make seekers of hiding people. Questions we can understand – What is on the other side of a black hole? How did humans get here? Why would you let this happen, God? – their answers often we cannot. But God wants seekers as desperate as he. How humiliatingly humble a thing it must be for an all-knowing God to lower himself enough to ask a question of a people without knowledge. But that is my God, who seeks hiding people to the very end.
…who asked of Job, shivering in sackcloth with strength left enough only to wag a finger at God, “Would you discredit my justice?”
…who laid bare his infinite longing as he called out to Adam, shadowed in his shame, “Where are you?”
…who stooped low enough, at the uproar of hell and the disbelief of heaven, to make himself one of us. All so that he could seek hiding people, and invite hiding people to seek. In Jesus the longing love of the Father has a face, and a voice, quiet enough not to shatter the mountain, but compelling enough to draw us out of the cave. Jesus, the “incarnation of God’s furious longing”; the ultimate seeker, frantic for the sought. The Cross has made mute forever the question of how God responds to the human condition. He responds to it by embodying it, enveloping it. Every last twitch and tinge of humanity he takes upon himself. There is no corner of the desert that is not marked by the footprints of Jesus. Everywhere we go, he has been; indeed because he lives in us, everywhere we go he already is. And though that sometimes offers little hope to the child left abandoned at the loss of their parents or even to the tired old prophet fleeing the noose, it at very least says, like a still, small voice in the desert: “no matter how far you run from me, know that I will be waiting for you when you get there.”
“My dove in the clefts on the rock, in the hiding places on the mountainside,
show me your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is beautiful.”
- Song of Songs -
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