Elijah has long had a place in Jewish spirituality and practice as heralding the coming of the Messiah. According to scripture Elijah did not die, but rather ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot about 700 years before Christ. And so he is a living presence throughout Jewish history occasionally appearing to rescue people from danger and reveal secrets of the Torah. He visits every bris (the ceremony of circumcision) and at every Passover, the door is open, a place at the table set with an empty chair, and a cup of wine is poured for Elijah.
Elijah represents the ever present protection, salvation and presence of God, and so though it seems like the crowd has misunderstood Jesus’ cry, “Eloi, Eloi” as a call for Elijah, Elijah is also the one who comes at the darkness hour, just as this day was, when the sky was black at noon. So it is Elijah the people think of at this moment when it seems that all is lost.
The Jewish people throughout their history have known the reality of exile, of abandonment, of being forsaken by God. Night by Elie Wiesel describes his experience as a young boy in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. It is a night, a time of deep darkness, of abandonment, in which his God dies at the hands of Nazi’s as surely as all the millions of human beings who also lost their lives.
And yet he begins his Nobel Prize acceptance speech many years later, by giving thanks to our common Creator, as, he says, Jewish tradition commands us to do. “Barukh shehekhyanu vekiymanu vehigianu lazman haze.” “Blessed be Thou for having sustained us until this day.” For Elie Weisel the reality of suffering in this life has meant his own dedication to stand in solidarity with all who suffer injustice throughout the world. He ends his speech by giving thanks also to his younger self saying, “I express my deepest gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering, not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone, they belong to all those who need us desperately.”
St John of the Cross, 16th Century Spanish mystic and poet, speaks of the Spiritual Path as the Dark Night of the Soul. This is not a path for the faint hearted. All of us have experienced periods of pain and sadness, times of great grief as well as times of spiritual dryness, desert times when we cannot feel the presence of God.
But I think for Elie Wiesel and St John of the Cross, this Dark Night is not just a temporary passing time in our lives, it speaks of something fundamental about what it means to be a human being. We are finite, limited creatures who suffer and die, for whom God always remains a mystery, hidden in a cloud of unknowing, as another mystic once put it, and suffering is never something that can be explained. Life cannot be comprehended, rather it must be loved.
And in this love we always keep hoping. This too is essentially human. We keep opening the door for Elijah, waiting for him to appear. And even when he did not come to rescue Jesus from the cross, even though Jesus died after his own pitiful cry of forsakenness—even though this suffering of Christ is a sharing in the suffering of all of humanity, as we were reminded when we began this Holy Lent, that we are but dust and to dust we shall return—even though we walk through the valley of shadow and death and darkness covers the land—even so we fear no evil.
1 comment:
This is especially meaningful for me, now that my mother has passed. The quote, Blessed are you, King of the Universe, is something that the Jews recite in the Haggadah. The new translation by Jonathan Safran Foer reads, "Blessed are you, King of the Cosmos. I love that one too. Thanks for sharing this post in the Glen West group. It's lovely. Please keep blogging and sharing the posts with us Glen Westers.
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