Homilies

Back to Homilies menu

The last two lines of this familiar hymn allude to Elijah’s encounter with the Lord in the cave at Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19).  History is written by the victors, and so all we know about the struggle between Yahwism and Canaanite religion is from the Old Testament account. 

In this account Elijah is the hero and the Canaanite queen who opposed him has gone down in history as the villainess par excellence, Queen Jezebel.  A feminist reading this story might interpret it rather differently: Jezebel was a strong woman with a weak husband who did what was necessary to try to preserve the old religion.  In our Anglican history Mary Tudor, “Bloody Mary,”  comes to mind. 

In Paul’s farewell speech to the Ephesian elders at Miletus we have a similar confrontation between two religious traditions.  Paul’s allusion to “fierce wolves” and “men speaking perverse things” (Acts 20:29.30) is thought to refer to the Gnostics, who posed a severe challenge to Christian orthodoxy in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of our era and who, like the followers of Baal, were persecuted to extinction. 

Here too history has been written by the victors, but the Gnostic “heresy” has found new attention in our own day through the recent discovery of long lost Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. 

From our vantage point in the 21st century the religious wars of the past serve to remind us that the function of all religion is to bring us into the presence of the Holy, an experience which is both fearful and fascinating and was granted to Elijah in the “still small voice of calm”—qol demanah daqqah, which Samuel Terrien renders as “the sound of absolute silence.” 

August 14, 2011

back to top