“Now I Know”: The Widow of Zarephath’s Son
This sermon is part of a Lenten midweek series on resurrections in Scripture.
Text: 1 Kings 17:17-24, James 5:13-20, Luke 4:16-30
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The widow of Zarephath—that’s all we know her as, we don’t have her name recorded in Scripture—was a faithful woman. When the prophet Elijah was passing through the region of Zarephath during the great famine that the Lord was sending because of Israel’s sin, he saw her at the gate of the city. When he told her to bring her a little water and bread, she said that she had none. She only had a handful of flour in the bin and little oil in a jug, and she was gathering some sticks to build a small fire to bake the last of it into a meager bit of bread for her son and herself, so that they could eat it, the last of their food, and then prepare to die. But when Elijah gave the audacious command from the Lord to make a small cake of bread for him first, and then some for her and her son, because the Lord would not let the flour or oil run out until the famine was over, she believed and did as Elijah said. She and her son were able to eat throughout the famine, even while the rest of the region starved.
But after this, after she had shown hospitality to the Lord’s prophet and shared what she thought was her last meal, everything she thought she knew had fallen apart. Her son fell ill and died. In her grief, in her anger, in her deep sorrow at the death of her son, she raged at Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God?” She had given him food from her own scarce supply. She had fed him and shown hospitality to him in spite of the fact that there was so little to go around because of this brutal famine. But now this? Her son dead? “Have you come to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son?” Death shows up uninvited in her home and she instinctively questioned if God was against her.
The widow of Zarephath assumed that this death was God’s punishment for her sin. For we know—deep in our bones, under all the lies we tell ourselves about bad luck and misfortune and happenstance—that God does rule over all things and that our sins deserve death. Now we don’t know what the widow’s sin was that she was so terrified was being brought to remembrance and was being punished. But we know what it is to have those sins that we have hidden deep in our past, deep in our hearts, deep in our minds, that we know have flown in the face of God’s commands. We instinctively know the penalty those sins have warranted. It’s death. We know that the wages of sin is death. We know that the Law has decreed it from Mount Sinai and in the halls of our consciences. And it terrifies us.
But Elijah, prophet that he is, is used to such accusations. He doesn’t debate with her about the consequences of sin and whether her past resulted in her son’s death. He doesn’t scold her or get his feelings hurt by her lashing out. He simply says calmly, “Give me your son.” He takes the dead child from her and he carries the boy up into the upper room where Elijah was staying and laid him on his own bed. From there Elijah cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, why have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by killing her son?” It’s Elijah’s turn, as prophet, to take the widow’s complaint, her sorrow, her shame, her guilt, her fear that God has abandoned her, and he pours it out before the Lord. Elijah doesn’t have the answer of why this bad thing happened to this faithful, generous woman. But he does what he should—what all of us should—and he brings it all before God, even the pain and hurt that tragedy and disaster cause, even the death of this boy.
Prayer in the face of tragedy is—and should be—some of the most honest speaking we do before God. Everything else is stripped away: all the things we think we’ve earned, that we deserve, that are owed to us. We approach God with nothing, with no bartering chips, nothing to trade, nothing but guilt and death and we ask Him to do something about it. That’s the kind of raw honesty that prayer should be. You can ask God for whatever it is that will heal the tragedy, the open wound on your heart and soul. Elijah prayed to God, “Let this child’s life come into him again.” You can make such big requests too. That’s the kind of honesty, that’s the kind of faith, that recognizes that God can do anything. Elijah can ask, you can ask, but only God can raise the dead. And as we will discover this Lenten season as we walk through the resurrections in Scripture, that’s precisely what God does.
“The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah. And the life of the child came into him again, and he revived.” God is not distant. He is not deaf to the cries of His people. He is not heartless and calculating, a divine abacus working out the mathematics of life and death in the grand scheme of things. He answers Elijah’s prayer out of mercy for the widow. He alone has power over life and death and He grants life to this boy who had died.
This is pure grace. Nothing the widow did earned it. Nothing Elijah did won it. God granted life because this is who He is. He is the God who brings life from death, who is Life Himself, and shares that life abundantly with His creation. Yes, St. James tells us, “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.” Elijah prayed, but as Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, only God sends His rain upon the just and the unjust alike.
So that upper room, which had so quickly become a place of death and isolation, became a place of resurrected life. And this points us forward to another upper room, where Jesus will gather His disciples for the Last Supper before His death. And just as Elijah stretched himself over the dead boy’s body three times—close, body to body contact, life touching death—it’s in that other upper room that Jesus will grant His disciples to have close, body to body contact, His own body and blood touching their death, their sin, and forgiving it because of what He will go on to do the very next day in His crucifixion. The ultimate sleeping chamber, greater than Elijah’s upper room, will be the tomb carved in rock, where Jesus’ body will be laid until it is resurrected, after He’s taken our death into Himself and killed it on the cross. The same God who heard Elijah’s prayer and raised the widow’s son will raise Mary’s Son from the tomb. And because of that, you know that you will rise too. Your loved ones will rise. Those who you lost, who you prayed for day and night, who you’ve grieved, who you’ve accused God of taking from you, even if it was in your secret heart—they will be raised too, just as surely as the widow’s son was raised; just as surely as God’s Son was resurrected.
“Now I know that you are a man of God,” the widow said after her son was raised, “and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true.” Notice that she doesn’t say, “I always knew,” or “I suspected,” or even “I hoped.” She says, “Now I know.” And this is where the Gospel leads us: out of doubt and into faith; out of death and into life. Resurrection changes everything, even our hearts. And that resurrection comes through the word of the Lord, as the widow recognized.
You too will say, “Now I know that that word of the Lord is true” when you are resurrected, when your loved ones are. It may not be tonight or tomorrow. You may have to wait for it. God might not grant your prayer until the end of time. But He will grant it. It is coming. Jesus has said so. He sealed that promise with His own resurrection and nothing can undo that. That Word of life will raise and give everlasting life to you and all believers. That’s the promise you have in Him. That’s our prayer of faith. And that’s what is waiting for you so that you can confess this Lent, this Easter, and forevermore, “Now I know.” In the name of Jesus, who leads us out of doubt to faith. Amen.
