1 Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3 Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there. 4 But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” 5 Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” 6 He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. He ate and drank and lay down again. 7 The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you.” 8 He got up and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. 9 At that place he came to a cave and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” 11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 14 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” 15 Then the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus.”
– 1 Kings 19:1-15a, NRSVue
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In 1st Kings 18-19 the prophet Elijah experiences a tale of two mountains, each representing a vastly different vision of power: both the power of the state and the power of God. In rapid succession Elijah learns the dangers of failing to keep these visions in tension, for 1 Kings 18 tells the story of Elijah’s triumphal victory, and 1 Kings 19 tells the story of Elijah fleeing for his life.
While I’ve never felt the hounds of Jezebel nip at my heels, I’ve done my fair share of complaining to and ranting at God—in churches, on mountains, in my living room, and on—and I can appreciate the head of steam Elijah has built within him. He’s so flummoxed that angels tell him, twice, to eat some food and take a nap (verses 5-8)—the universal cure.
He finally arrives at Mount Horeb and explains to God that while he has been “very zealous” for the Lord, the government God put in place (the royal couple of Ahab and Jezebel: kings were still understood to have gained their legitimacy due to God’s approval) was destroying everything he was trying to build, including killing all of God’s prophets. In other words, Elijah is pleading and complaining, simultaneously, asking God to step in: “Please help me, I’m backed against a wall here, and I’m doing what you told me to do!”
This isn’t the first mountain Elijah has climbed seeking to encounter the Divine. In fact, the spark that lights the conflict in 1 Kings 19 was lit just before in 1 Kings 18, when, in the midst of a long-simmering conflict between the prophet and the monarchy which has culminated in a three year drought (intended as punishment for royal behaviour and royal arrogance), Elijah decides on a show of Divine power which will prove, definitively, that the God of Israel is powerful and the storm gods are not.
Elijah chooses Mt. Carmel as his staging area, the top of which—visible for miles around—was a millenia-old ritual site. Elijah is seeking to demonstrate, with no room for doubt, that everything connected to the worship of Baal (and any other deity connected to the pantheistic pantheons of the religious traditions surrounding Palestine) is inherently unstable and weak as it sits on the foundation of the unstable and weak deities preferred by the royal couple.
How do you undermine the power of a storm god? By doing exactly what Elijah does: demonstrating not only that the storm god cannot produce fire, but that YHWH can do so under any circumstances, even in the presence of a literal ditch-full of water. Look at Zeus: the whole point of a sky god is to be able to demonstrate power over the energy of the cosmos. Zeus without a lightning bolt? Whoever heard of such a thing?!
Elijah achieves his objective—the uncovering of the lie of Baal’s power, and thus the uncovering of the lie upon which the royal couple based their claims to power. The challenge, however, lies with the fact that the royal couple cared very little for the truth, and instead used the cult of Baal (with its prophets, its adherents, its rituals, its view of the nature and state of the world) to expand their own power. Elijah doesn’t help matters, however, when he demonstrates his truly unfortunate tendency to massacre his rivals—if the text is to be believed, hundreds of people lost their lives at Elijah’s command.
Prophets of a fallen god or no, slaughtering the entire priestly class of the royal couple’s preferred religion is not the way to keep in the good graces of the powerful. In a sense, therefore, Mt. Carmel represents a very particular vision of Divine power, one dependent on a definition of power that equates it entirely with the strength to impose one’s will on another – even to the point of death. It’s an astonishing demonstration, yet also an extremist one, requiring power to equal unfathomable force: the unquenchable fire and Elijah’s subsequent unquenchable thirst to eliminate his enemies.
I don’t need to critique the necessity of Elijah’s actions as 1 Kings 19 does this work for me.
Returning to Mt. Horeb, in 1 Kings 19:11-13 God teaches Elijah a lesson in the power of God, demonstrating that human assumptions of power and its proper use immediately fail in the eyes of God (verses 1–13). This passage mentions a powerful wind (verse 11), yet it is not the Spirit of God, nor is Spirit in the earthquake and fire (verse 12). These three images—earth, wind, and fire—were traditional symbols of God’s presence and power. (And symbols of funky R&B beats as well. But I digress.)
Elijah, however, recognizes that by presenting themself only in the powerful silence, Spirit is teaching him to experience God’s presence through its seeming absence as much as its presence—perhaps even more so. God is stressing to Elijah that God exists on both the immanent and transcendent plane—both in the cacophony of creation and in the mysterious silence we experience deep within our souls.
In 1 Kings 18-19 we thus have a tale of two mountains, where Mt. Carmel tells a story of the power of God through unleashing that power in a flash of overwhelming force, while Mt. Horeb tells a story of the power of God through its discipline and absence. Together, they represent the dynamic tension present between the paradoxical duality of God’s presence and absence, the kataphatic and apophatic aspects of God, where both are present simultaneously.
The inherent challenge of Mt. Horeb lies with the fact that to those marinated in a worldview that only sees power as force exerted over another, the God present in the absolute powerful absence of the sheer silence is completely invisible, thus leading to a vision of God dependent entirely on Mt. Carmel: an incomplete, hollowed shell of a theology dependent on shrinking God to the heretically-tiny role of fascist fanboy.
June 16 is—notably—the anniversary of Trump’s infamous “American Carnage” speech, when he descended on a golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and declared his first candidacy for the presidency, while also revealing his vision for a United States made great “again”—the assumption being that it was “great” at one point in its history. (This is a debatable point, I must add.)
Between his vicious xenophobia and racism, his consummate braggadocio, his complete incapacity to speak without lying, his rambling nonsense (and his rambling, stream-of-consciousness conspiracy theories), his delusions of strength and grandeur, his soon-to-be-infamous imagery of a nation betrayed and hollowed out from within by shadowy forces of weakness (i.e., equity, inclusion, and “wokeness”), Trump revealed everything that would define the experience of being alive during the Trump/MAGA era.
Anyone surprised at how much Trump’s worldview is shaped by American celebrity culture and a specific, oppressive patriarchal masculinity obviously wasn’t living where I was in the 1980’s, a small town in New York filled to the brim with police officers, firefighters, and ex-military—that is, an assortment of men (and their families) shaped by the particular kind of masculinity (and “power”) Trump praises and centers and seeks to embody for his followers. Even then, Donald Trump was seen as an exemplar of a particular kind of dominant masculinity, attractive because of its access to a world of success, money, power, influence, and beauty—the same milieu (and attendant worldview) Trump still purports to represent and that is one of the cornerstones of his appeal.
None of this—the authoritarian ranting, the blustery rhetorical bludgeoning—is new. This is the same man who ordered the separation of migrant children from their parents (some permanently)—perhaps the most cruel policy to emerge from his ineffectual and divisive first administration. This is also the same perspective that feels entirely justified in sending in the military to force protestors (“animals” and “foreign enemies”, in Trumpist parlance) to accept his worldview at the point of a firearm: In other words, obey, or face overwhelming physical force. The last decade has been a surrealist and terrifying Orwellian delirium in which the world is cracked and capsized.
Yet, none of this is unique to Trump or the MAGA movement. Racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, structural injustice—some of this is written into the very fabric of the United States, even included in our founding documents. Many of the divisions sundering our society, and the charlatans manipulating these rifts in order to benefit from whipping people into a frothy frenzy, have been present in our country since time immemorial.
Similarly, the last decade has been apocalyptic not because of the turmoil and strife but because of the ways they have revealed truths about the world that cannot be unknown. The rise of Trumpism ended the world as we knew it and birthed two worlds, two entirely different universes within the United States, with people who experience the world around them in fundamentally divergent ways.
What is true in one world is almost guaranteed to be seen as lies in the other, and what is seen as right in one world is almost guaranteed to be critiqued as wrong in the other. Both worlds have their own understanding of truth, publicized by their own media universes. This level of extreme polarization usually accompanies some form of civil war—even if it is a cold war, as our current situation seems to be.
This is the context within which the rising tide of American authoritarianism popular at this moment rests: power as plaything, serving the rich, powerful, and white at the expense of literally anyone else, imposed and controlled by overwhelming force and violence. The current putrid miscarriage of power demonstrated in the siccing of the military on Americans—civilians, no less—is what emerges when Mt. Carmel stands alone, twisted and imbalanced by the absence of Mt. Horeb.
God’s power only makes sense in paradoxical multiplicity, in a harmonious dance between its presence and absence, where each vision disciplines and corrects the other. The balance between Mt. Carmel and Mt. Horeb reminds humanity that power requiring constant demonstrations is inherently weak, incomplete, and highly susceptible to the unsettling and unexpected power of love, empathy, and silence.
What happens when weak authoritarians face the power of Mt. Horeb? We are about to find out.
