Daily Bible Reading: 1 Kings 21 and Luke 4:1-30

1 Kings 21 -    Naboth the Jezreelite has a vineyard next to Ahab’s palace.  Ahab wants it for a vegetable garden and tells Naboth he will pay for it; but Naboth does not want to sell it.  It is his family’s ancestral home.  Ahab becomes “resentful and sullen” again over this and will not eat (21:4). Jezebel can’t understand why he doesn’t just take the land. “Do you now govern Israel?” (21:7) So she decides she will handle the matter.  She plans to have Naboth falsely accused of some crime by the city’s elders and nobles—like cursing the king or something.  A Jerusalem Bible note says that the property of traitors reverted automatically to the king. They do it, and in the end Naboth is taken out and stoned – no legal process, simply accusation and death. Jezebel tells Ahab he may now go and take possession of the vineyard.

                 

But “then the Lord said to Elijah, . . . ‘Go to King Ahab of Samaria [and] tell him that I, the Lord, say to him, ‘After murdering the man, are you taking over his property as well?’ Tell him that this is what I [the Lord] say: ‘In the very place that the dogs licked up Naboth’s blood, they will lick up you blood!’” (21:19). He also foresees a terrible end for Jezebel: “The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the bounds of Jezreel” (21:23). Ahab tears his garments and fasts when he hears this, so the Lord relents somewhat, telling Elijah “Since he [Ahab] has done this, I will not bring disaster on him during his lifetime; it will be during his son’s lifetime that I will bring disaster on Ahab’s family” (21:29). Yet another difficult moral framework for modern readers to accept – that somehow God finds an equal justice in punishing the offspring of the real perpetrators.

Luke 4:1-30 - Having had it revealed to Jesus in his baptism that he is God’s “beloved Son” Jesus goes out into the wilderness and is tested.  Of interest in comparing this to Mark’s version, here it says, “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove” – all very public.  In Mark it says, “as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him” (1:10).  The idea of it being a personal opening to Jesus is more likely in the Mark version.  Here there is an attempt to make it look like the vision was there for all to see. 

He goes out into the desert for 40 days, eating nothing.  The devil comes to him and tempts him three times: once suggesting he should command the stones to becomes loaves of bread since he is so hungry; once offering him the glory and authority bestowed on rulers over all the kingdoms of the world; and finally tempting him to put God to the test by hurling himself off the Temple to see if God will protect him as is promised in scripture.  Jesus refuses all of these.

The Spirit of God is with him but he eats nothing for forty days, fasting to attain clarity and self-discipline to discern what it means that he is God’s “beloved Son.”  Does it mean that he will be given miraculous powers to feed the masses and thus win favor by satisfying the material needs of man? Does it mean that he is to have power over all the earthly kingdoms of this world? Does it mean that whatever he wants and needs, he will be able to attain from God because of God’s special love for him.  He learns in turning his back on all these temptations that the true path of the Son of God is not any of these.  It is not clear that the reality of what it does import appeared to Jesus at this time, but there were clearly a number of possibilities that “tempted Jesus” when he considered how he might use his powers.  It is these that he turns his back on.  He meets temptation with obedience and lowliness.  The scriptures he cites show that even for Jesus the ancient Hebrew scriptures were a source of guidance and inspiration, but we must be careful here for the devil too quotes scripture to Jesus.  It is not the words found in scripture but the spirit of discernment applied to them that provides the wisdom.

After concluding his time in the desert, Jesus goes to his own town, Nazareth, and begins to preach in the synagogue. At first people admire him for his “gracious words” (4:22), but they soon turn on him when he compares them with some of the stubborn Jews of old and praises the outsiders in Israel’s past who were more open to God than the people (the Phoenician widow in Elijah’s story, Naaman the Syrian). Jesus adds to the Naaman story a detail that is not obvious from the scriptures – that the prophet Elisha was unable to cure anyone of leprosy in his own land.

I like it here that Jesus is using the book of Kings to teach the people – we need to remember that when we have the urge to throw out or denigrate the sometimes messy stories that come to us in Kings. What Kings teaches here is that often “the stranger,” “the foreigner,” is more open to the healing touch of the prophet than the people God called to him through Abraham and Moses.  Jesus uses this to reproach the people of Nazareth and they “get it” in no uncertain terms.  They are offended by his criticism of their complaisance or their unwillingness to believe in a “prophet” [Jesus] who is altogether too familiar to them to really “see.”  They are like the dutiful son in the prodigal son story.  They cannot see into their father’s depths because they are too used to seeing him with eyes of flesh.  The “living God” is different from the notion of God we create in learning about him as a child.  This is a lesson we too must learn.  We will never see God or hear His voice in us if we cling too tenaciously to the notions we learn of Him before we have experienced Him.  We somehow must be brought to see the great gulf that lies between Him and the familiar comfortable concepts we have of him – in a sense we must all come to him as foreigners, strangers, sinners, outsiders. 

They run him out of town. He goes to Capernaum

Daily Bible Reading: 1 Kings 16-17 and Luke 1:39-80

1 Kings 16 – For modern readers, the cast of characters in Kings can be very challenging. We have Ahijah the prophet from Shiloh – a good man who prophesies against Jeroboam and his line because of their unfaithfulness to the one God. Then there is the Ahijah from the tribe of Issachar – a different man apparently – whose son Baasha takes over the northern kingdom and has all of Jeroboam’s line killed. It is tempting to think they might have been related Ahijahs but apparently they are not.

Now we have a prophet named Jehu – son of Hanani who speaks God’s word to Baasha, telling him that he too has provoked God’s anger and that he too will be “consume[d]” (16:3). Later there will be another Jehu, a different man, who will become king of Israel for a while. The prophet Jehu sends a message to King Baasha, telling him he has also led God’s people into sin and will also die – with his whole family – just as Jeroboam was eliminated. It is interesting that one of the sins listed against the house of Baasha is his killing of Jeroboam’s “house.” So even though this was prophesied, it was not seen as the will of God.

Baasha manages to live out his life as king. His son Elah succeeds him. Elah only reigns for two years in Israel.  It is through Zimri, the commander of Elah’s forces that the prophesy of Jehu s comes to pass. Zimri kills Elah when he is drunk one day, and then Zimri has all of Baasha’s family killed. “Because of their idolatry and because they led Israel into sin, Baasha and his son Elah had aroused the anger of the Lord” (16:13).

Zimri rules for only seven days in Tirzah. Israelite troops fighting in Philistia, learn of Zimri’s coup and they plot against him. When Zimri learns of their plot, he “went into the palace’s inner fortress, set the palace on fire and died in the flames” (16:18). They set their chief commander, Omri, as king. This revolt ends with the people of Israel are divided—half loyal to one Tibni, and the other half to Omri.  But Tibni dies, so Omri is left in charge. 

Omri reigns for 12 years.  It is Omri who builds the city of Samaria on a hill that he buys. Around 875 BC, Omri’s son Ahab becomes the king of Israel. Ahab “sinned against the Lord more than any of his predecessors” (16:30). He takes as his wife Jezebel, daughter of King Ethbaal of Sidon. “He built a temple to Baal in Samaria, made an altar for him, and put it in the temple. He also put up an image of the goddess Asherah” (16:32-33). A Jerusalem Bible note says Ethbaal was a priest of Asherah (Astarte) who seized power in Tyre at the same time as Omri in Israel.  They allied themselves to each other. The “effects on the religion of Israel of this association with the Philistines were to be increasingly felt throughout the reign of Ahab.

During Ahab’s reign a man named Hiel builds (or rebuilds) the city of Jericho—and sacrifices his eldest son Abiram as part of it.  The gates of the city are consecrated with the sacrifice of his youngest son Segub.

1 Kings 17 – This first appearance of Elijah the Tishbite (of Tishbe in Gilead). He goes to Ahab and prophecies drought.  He himself goes, at God’s command, to live in the Wadi Cerith, east of the Jordan.  There the ravens feed him bread and meat every morning and evening; and he drinks from the wadi. Soon it dries up, so he goes to Zarephath where the Lord tells him a widow will feed him.  He meets the widow at the gate gathering sticks and asks her for bread.  She has nothing—only a handful of meal in a jar and a little oil.  She is gathering sticks to prepare one last meal for her and her son.  Elijah tells her not to fear, to do as she planned, but to give him a little something first—that the meal and oil will not fail until the day the Lord sends rain to the earth again.  It happens.

                 

After, the widow’s son becomes ill.  She yells at Elijah for bringing this problem on them by “bring[ing] [her]sin to remembrance” (17:17). He takes her dying son to his (Elijah’s) room and lays him on his bed; he asks the Lord why he has brought this calamity on them.  He lies on the child three times and begs the Lord to let the child live. The Lord “listened to the voice of Elijah” (17:22). She acknowledges then that he is a man of God.

Luke 1:39-80 - Mary visits Elizabeth and when Elizabeth hears Mary coming in to their home, “the baby [John} moved within her” (1:41). Mary’s “Song of Praise” follows. This “Magnificat” is among a number of hymns that appear in New Testament writing. Brown notes that the “canticles reflect the style of contemporary Jewish hymnology” of the time, that “every line echoes the OT so that the whole is a mosaic of scriptural themes reused for a new expression of praise” (232). This hymn is patterned on the hymn of Hannah, Samuel’s mother in 1 Samuel 2:1-10.

She remains with Elizabeth and Zechariah until the birth of John, then returns to Nazareth. Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit to prophecy, speaks of the “mighty savior” God is sending to save his people “from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us” (1:71). The savior expected is one who will rescue his people “from the hands of [their] enemies” so that they can “serve him without fear” (1:73). The purpose of his own son John will be to “go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins” (1:77).

                 

So both John and Jesus are introduced here before they are born as fulfillments of the promises God has given his people over the years.