Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14
Psalm 77
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Luke 9:51-61 “My 1865 Webster’s defines translation
as ‘being conveyed from one place to another; removed to heaven without dying.’ We must have an art that translates, conveys us to the heaven of that deepest reality which otherwise ‘we may die without ever having known’; that t
ransmits us there, not in the sense of bringing information to the receiver but of putting the receiver in the place of the event – alive.” -- Denise Levertov, “Great Possessions”
“The Translation of Elijah” has always seemed to me a strange title for the chariot of fire scene. “Translation,” I thought, was merely a matter of substituting words in one language for words in another language. At this crucial juncture in the Elijah story, however, translation is a fiery threshold, the means by which Elisha receives a double portion of the Spirit that animates the Prophet Elijah’s life. Not the spirit that animated Ahab and Jezebel. Not the spirit that animated the whole religious industry that had made its peace with Ahab in order to ensure its success. “Let me inherit a double portion of
your spirit,” Elisha prays of Elijah.
This story occurs in the book of the Bible entitled “Kings,” but the main characters are prophets, especially Elijah and Elisha. The book title is tongue-in-cheek irony. Beyond the headline stealing royal pretensions and exploits, there is an alternate history going on, seen clearly, spoken obediently, and lived courageously by those animated by the prophetic spirit.
A proper prayer for us during this season of Pentecost, isn’t it? A prayer that we too receive this animating Spirit that transmits us into an alternate history rather than simply bringing us information about it. The difference is vast. James McClendon ruefully characterizes “the comfortable wasteland of that numerous tribe, the half-Christians, busy about their little cares and wants, conformed to the mores of their own society or the fashions this present age.” (
Ethics, 243)
Maybe the kind of translation Denise Levertov is talking about is how the Spirit works to bring us out of that dubious tribe. Maybe discipleship is our continual openness to receive the power to be witnesses, to be transmitted into “the heaven of that deepest reality.”
“When the days drew near for him to be taken up” indicates that Luke had the Elijah typology of the Second Kings story in mind as he tells of Jesus setting his face to go to Jerusalem (for an insightful study on the ways these two passages shed light on each other see A. Katherine Grieb, “Living by the Word,”
Christian Century, 6/30/2013).
Jacque Ellul goes further in making the intriguing claim that Elisha is a type, an image, of Jesus Christ. Having received the double portion of the spirit that animated Elijah, Elisha’s ministry, like that of Jesus, is marked by a “superabundance of miracles” that signifies “the explosive, unbounded presence of the Spirit” (
The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, 9-22).
Elisha is a prophet of power, whose ministry signifies that the kingdom of God has drawn near. While Second Kings is the “most political” of all biblical books, telling of God’s mysterious interventions in “a period in the history of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel as they are playing their part in the concert of empires,” Ellul notes that the specific testimony of Elisha is the “close intermingling of political action and the individual witness of love.”
The unbounded presence of the Spirit brings an art that translates us out of the tribe of half-Christians, an art of living and an art of speaking. The art of living is a life of covenant, a subject I’ve thought a lot about recently. This past Saturday, our daughter gave and received the vows of the marriage covenant. Two days later our other daughter launched out on a cross-country drive with her husband of two years (and their dog), as he will soon begin a position at a West Coast seminary.
I wonder what shape their marriages will take. What understandings do they bring to their marriage that they have learned and absorbed from Jane and me, who will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary this Sunday? Have we imparted that marriage is not dominated by the myth of romantic love but by discipleship? Will they recognize the deep domestic joy that does not domesticate the power of God unto salvation but rather embodies it? How we yearn for them continued openness to the art of living in covenant that can translate them, and others, into the alternate history of the Spirit.
Seen from this angle, I better understand the negotiations of Elisha and the three potential followers of Jesus (e.g. “Lord, let me first go…”). Lynn Powell begins her poem “Raising Jesus” by wondering how Mary’s “ordinary work” that followed “the remarkable birth” made “a learned boy in the temple from a squalling newborn.” She pictures her own children at play in the kitchen where she’s working, and concludes with this prayer:
Oh God, keep me a mediocre Mary!
Dilute my children’s love with selfishness,
let them refuse the treacherous kiss, never know
the miserable cup. Make their lives long, happy, ordinary –
and forgive the mother, reaching for Your hem, craving that miracle.
Still, we are called to follow, even as Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem, lest lives become “busy about their little cares and wants, conformed to the mores of their own society or the fashions of this present age.”
So there is an art of living. And certainly, translation involves a verbal art as well. Eugene Peterson never intended to publish
The Message. A senior editor at a publishing company secured Peterson’s published fragments on Galatians and encouraged him to expand his project.
For a long time, Peterson resisted because he saw his knowledge and use of biblical languages as not so much the work of a translator as it was a pastoral act. The reason he translated Galatians was that after twenty years as the pastor of a congregation he founded, he “sensed that these people to whom I was pastor was slipping into a kind of Americanized religion in which they were becoming conformed to the security systems and consumer satisfactions of the culture around them.”
He continued, “I wanted to recover the energetic vigor of Paul’s insistence on living original lives in Christ, not lives sustained by hand-me-downs from the culture.” So he spent two years teaching and preaching Galatians in an attempt “to free their Americanized imaginations for living freely in Christ.”
Christ has set us free to live a free life.
So take your stand!
Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.
When Peterson finally consented to translate the entire Bible, he discovered that thirty years of pastoral work in his congregation had caused the seed words of the Bible to germinate. “When it came time to do the actual writing…, I felt that I was walking through an orchard at harvest time.”