Text- help- Expectancy background.

Context as provided from the interpreters Bible volume three.

I am drifting from the practice here a little. Part of the reason for this is to be pragmatic. If I have it here on Lectionary ...Go I don't have to bring the text's down with me to Florida.

I was glad Peter helped flesh out the wider context of 1Kings 17. Elijiah has been sent to the widow. Both Elijiah and the widow are in a more precarious situation than I had first imagined. There is no rain. The wadi has dried up. The people are literally dying of thirst and starving. The widow's response to Elijiah is not that she has simply given up hope because her internal compass see's only misery. Her internal compass see's only misery because she is living through a drought and people are dying.

As I read the commentary I could not help but sense a soap opera element. All the elements are there in 1 Kings 17. The first character is Elijiah the wise man making his way by God's grace. He enters the town and finds the widow who is with out hope. Elijiah demands that she feed him and give him drink. She is desperately low on food and water herself but does so sensing that this is a man of God. Not that the situation is not bad enough, the whole land dying from drought, but add to that the unfolding drama of the widow's son dying and Elijiah raising him to life. There is reason for drama here. The widow is first of all a widow. She has lost her husband and men were the means of living. As a widow she can not (I think) own land. As a widow she has no claim to anything but the mercy of others. On top of that add that she and her son (her future hope and potential deliverer) are dangerously close to losing water and meal. Nothing grows without rain. Water sources dry up. Add on top of that her son dying. Truly the widow is without hope.

In the commentary there is some words about God's Mysterious Moves. It makes a comparison between our understanding of the universe and Alice and Wonderland. In Alice in wonderland, Alice is puzzled because the balls and mallets in the croquet game do not stay put in her game. They moved on their own. The commentator states, "Like the child, we adults have to lean that we are not the only players in the game of living." Life at time does not always work as we understand it. I saw a television show on astrophysics and astronomy. In the show they talked about that the universe is expanding at such a rate that in billions of years we will not see the stars we see now because the distance between the galaxies will be so great that the light will not make it our own. They also spoke of something like the dark matter and believe there may be a weight in the universe that can not be seen. The universe that we live in does not behave in the manner that we see it. Science does not preclude God. "The living God in his living universe has a range of activity beyond ours, somewhat as the shades of color exceed our reach of vision" (spectrum and those ranges we can not see) If we can not see something like ultraviolet light than it is not so great a stretch to believe that God might be able to perform miracles that we can not comprehend.

God moves in a myserious way...His wonders to perfom... "This chapter is a study in the relationship between produce and providence. When Jesus bade his disciples, "Take...no thought for the morrow" (Matt. 6:34), he was not counseling them to overlook the morrow, but to look over it to catch the long views of the kingdom ahead." "A miracle is an event with which human comprehension has not yet caught up. It is not an interruption of law, but the working of a law which human reason has not yet charted."

Other good things from the commentary-
In 17:1-24
"Elijah is fed a first by the notoriously voracious ravens, and when the drought has persisted so long that the Wadi Cherith is dried up, he is fed by a poor widow of Phoenicia, herself on the point of starvation...the chapter concludeds with the story of the death and restoration fo the widow's son.

Elijah means Yah is EL...El being the general semitic name for the High God...Elijah's own name is the proclamation of his message

After the raising of the son by Elijah...important ending to pericope..." See your son lives." And the woman said to Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of Lord in your mouth is truth."