Elijah, the Ravens and the Widow

A widow gathers a few sticks outside the town gate. At home there is one handful of flour and a little oil. She is going to bake one last small loaf for herself and her son. And then, she thinks, there will be nothing left.

Ahab is king of Israel, and he has done more evil than all the kings before him. He has married Jezebel, a princess from Sidon, and built a temple for her god, Baal, right in his capital. Baal was worshipped as the god of storm and rain. Then a prophet appears out of nowhere: Elijah, from Tishbe in Gilead. He stands before Ahab and says, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain these years, except at my word.”

Then the word of the Lord comes to Elijah. Go east and hide by the brook Cherith, near the Jordan. You will drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there. So Elijah goes. And every morning, and every evening, ravens fly down to him carrying bread and meat. Ravens, birds that normally snatch food for themselves, bringing dinner to a prophet. He drinks from the brook. But there is no rain. Day by day the water gets lower. And one day, the brook dries up.

Then God speaks again. Get up and go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and stay there. I have commanded a widow there to feed you. Sidon. Jezebel's home country. Baal's own territory. Elijah walks there, and at the town gate he sees a widow gathering sticks. “Please bring me a little water in a jar,” he says. As she goes to get it, he calls after her. “And please bring me a piece of bread.” She stops. “As the Lord your God lives,” she says, “I have no bread. Only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. I'm gathering a couple of sticks so I can go home and make it for myself and my son. We'll eat it, and then we'll die.”

“Don't be afraid. Go and do as you have said. But first make me a small loaf and bring it to me, then make something for yourself and your son. For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: the jar of flour will not be used up, and the jug of oil will not run dry, until the day the Lord sends rain on the land.”

It is a lot to ask. But she goes, and she does what Elijah says. And the next day, there is flour in the jar. And the next. And the next. Day after day, for her, for her son and for Elijah, the flour never runs out, and the oil never fails, just as the Lord had said.

Some time later, the widow's son becomes ill. He grows worse and worse, until he stops breathing. His mother is heartbroken, and she turns on Elijah. Did you come here to remind me of my sin and to kill my son? “Give me your son,” Elijah says gently. He carries the boy up to the upstairs room where he stays, lays him on the bed, and cries out to the Lord. Three times he stretches himself out over the child and prays. “O Lord my God, let this child's life come back into him.” And the Lord hears. The boy breathes again. Elijah carries him downstairs and hands him to his mother. “See, your son is alive.” And she says, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”

Zarephath was a real Phoenician town on the Mediterranean coast between Tyre and Sidon, at the place now called Sarafand in Lebanon. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the archaeologist James Pritchard excavated there and uncovered pottery kilns, houses and a small shrine. Centuries after Elijah, Jesus reminded his hometown synagogue that, of all the widows in that famine, Elijah was sent to a foreigner in Zarephath.

The story of Elijah, the ravens and the widow is in First Kings, chapter 17. God fed his prophet with birds, filled a poor woman's jar one day at a time, and gave a mother back her son. So here is the question. What do you need God to provide for you today, just for today?