![]() ![]() I want to talk back with God, ask God why the gifts God put in my path die, and find spiritual understandings that include failures, with all their hidden powers and gifts. This is important, because this is much more our human experience-not the grand, triumphant successful gesture, but the stumbling persistence, and the experience of failure.Īs a long follower of Jesus, I know this failure, and I want to be as honest and bold as this woman is in this text. The story is in Scripture because he succeeds, but the hidden narrative is how closely he flirts with failure. ![]() Scripture tells us that he does this “eye to eye, mouth to mouth.” It is powerfully, creepily intimate. The final step is to lay himself out on the child’s body. Elisha, holy man who had asked for a double portion of his mentor Elijah’s power, has to work hard to bring this child back.Often the women whose stories make it into Scripture are “those women”-the ones who will not shut up, who do not follow convention, who positively insert themselves into the text.) She wants him to understand her pain, and she will not be silenced. When she finally does reach him, she repeats one, haunting line: “I told you not to lie to me.” (Twelve years later, she remembers that first interchange. Not telling her husband any of her plans, she sets off to find Elisha on her own. When the child dies, she boldly lays the dead body on the bed in the room of the holy prophet.Since she doesn’t play the game, Elisha and his servant, Gehazi, decide that she could use a son to which she has a cheeky and amazing response: “Don’t lie to me.” (Really, you have to go read this story! It is peppered with feisty surprises.) This woman does not fall for the culture of favors.These are rich, holy questions to ask ourselves. Which is a way of asking myself about identity as well as remembering what grounds me. ![]() I love this boldness, and I have spent a lot of time asking myself who my own people are. The holy man asks her what she would like in return for her generosity (while making it clear that he has the ear of powerful other men, kings and generals.) She looks at him and says, simply: “I live among my own people.” She refuses the game of paybacks.Buried in text are some astonishing holy insurrections. Ultimately, the prophet himself comes, though he does send some intermediaries, and after some fits and starts, the child comes back to life. She lays his body in the holy room, the room she built for the prophet to stay in, and goes, unaccompanied by her husband, to find the prophet. (She does.) When the boy is twelve, he is struck down with sudden illness while working in the field and he dies. In return (and unasked) Elisha tells her she will have a son. You may remember this woman-she offers to build an upper room for the prophet Elisha to stay in when he comes to town. Yet hidden precisely within these “narratives of the margins” are the rankling questions that upset the power structures and interrogate our assumptions about God.įor more than ten years, I have been working with the Shunammite woman of 2 Kings 4:8-37. They can appear sidekicks to the “real” stories of the (male) prophets, kings, patriarchs, warriors, and holy men. ![]() Most of them are, predictably, relegated to the margins. I hold these two realities in tension.īecause of this conviction, I pay constant attention to the stories of women who do break into Scripture. At the same time, I believe firmly that the hand of the Spirit of God shaped what was recorded, however troubling or puzzling however these recordings may reflect the dynamics of oppression in this world rather than the creative liberation I feel is core to the reign of God. The Bible comes to us out of a patriarchal culture. Part of the continuing series on biblical women. Support more of John’s incredible art and revolutionary vision (in affordable cards, prints) at. John August Swanson’s image “The Jester” seems to capture the story of the Shunammite woman who builds a room for the holy. ![]()
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