Think about Mount Tabor for a moment. Remember the blinding light of Jesus’ glory and the stunning presence of Elijah and Moses, the load of that moment and what it meant within the mind and heart of Peter, and what it confirmed concerning the dream that had taken up residence in his heart and his spiritual imagination. The brilliance of this dream—how incredibly close it felt on Mount Tabor—creates the unbearable cognitive dissonance with the truth of Jesus, arrested, mocked, beaten, scorned, flayed, and executed. Dead in a tomb.
These visions didn’t fit together: the bleach-white light of the Transfiguration, the ashen linen that now wrapped Jesus’ dead body, and the stony blackness of the tomb because the stone rolled shut against it. Peter had expected Elijah: fire from heaven, a land cleansed of evil. What he’d gotten as an alternative—I don’t think he had a reputation for it. I don’t know him.
But perhaps Peter didn’t know Elijah either.
Sometimes our expectations are the source of our pain.
Peter checked out Elijah and saw a conquering hero. But he was only listening to a part of the story.
When Elijah humiliated the prophets of Baal, the group of onlookers fell to the bottom and cried out, “The Lord—he’s God!” (1 Kings 18:39). They then slaughtered the prophets, cleansing the land of their oppression. Elijah then prayed for rain, and it got here. Ahab fled to Jezreel, unable to disclaim what he’d seen along with his own eyes. Mission achieved.
And yet it wasn’t. Jezebel responded to all Ahab told her by promising to kill Elijah, and the menace of humiliation and death overwhelmed him. He fled to the desert, collapsed under a brush tree, and prayed for death. “I’ve had enough,” he said. “Take my life; I’m no higher than my ancestors” (1 Kings 19:4). I hand over. I turned and ran. I failed. And I wish I were dead. It’s the cry of disillusionment and despair.
God gave Elijah the gift of sleep under the broom tree, woke him to feed him, and let him sleep again. When Elijah woke the second time, God fed him again to strengthen him for the long journey ahead to Mount Sinai.
Elijah’s journey from the broom tree to Sinai took 40 days and 40 nights—the identical length of time Goliath taunted the armies of Israel, the nice flood covered every living thing on earth, and, later, Jesus fasted within the wilderness. Elijah’s long-suffering wasn’t without purpose. There’s an intersection with God at the opposite end of 40 days and 40 nights, and Elijah would soon have his.
The query God asks Elijah within the cave at Mount Sinai is one he asks all of us who find ourselves disillusioned and disoriented. “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (v. 9).
It’s not unlike the query Jesus asks almost everyone he encounters within the Gospels: “What do you would like?”
The answer isn’t easily found. It’s hard to say “I would like to return” because you realize that the homeland you miss was built, to a point, on illusions. Disillusionment, in this manner, is a present, albeit an unpleasant one. But naming something higher is difficult too.
Elijah’s answer is illuminating, not because he provides us with the fitting response (as if there have been one) but because he shows a way forward: he complains. Loudly. Unapologetically. “I’ve given the whole lot to you, God. But now I’m alone. I don’t have any place to belong. No sacred spaces. Every memory is haunted. Everyone I loved and trusted has either turned on me or been crushed similar to me.”
I used to be raised to not complain, to see it as unvirtuous. I used to be also taught much concerning the holiness of God and what we were and weren’t allowed to say or do before him. But there’s a funny tension between my modern ideas and the attitudes of most of the fathers and moms of our faith within the Hebrew Bible. They have an audacity, a willingness to argue, complain, or speak out of naked self-interest. Maybe that’s one aspect of what it means to have a childlike faith: having the audacity to talk your mind in a relationship where the asymmetry of authority and control couldn’t be starker.
God tells Elijah to walk out onto the mountain. It appears, from the text, that he doesn’t, as an alternative watching from throughout the cave as a violent wind kicks up enough to tear the mountain apart and shatter rocks. But God isn’t within the wind. Then comes an earthquake, and still no God. Then comes fire, but again, God isn’t in the fireplace (1 Kings 19:11–12).
The account of God’s absence within the wind, quake, and fire is less about God and more about Elijah. He’s a veteran of God’s glory at Mount Carmel. He stands on what’s perhaps the holiest ground outside of Jerusalem, a mountain where God once before appeared spectacularly and renewed his covenant with Abraham’s children. But Elijah can’t see God within the spectacular anymore. The wind doesn’t move him. The earthquake doesn’t make him shiver. The fire leaves him cold.
As the ultimate traces of wind quiet and the last of the flames turn to embers, a deep silence settles over the mountain. There, like a whisper, Elijah hears the voice of God. There’s something different here, though, than the voice of God Elijah has been wrestling with up until now. He’s aware of the divine presence in a recent way and is ultimately drawn to it, walking to the mouth of the cave as if to get a greater listen.
I read this story as descriptive of a journey of the guts. It’s an image of the transformation that happens on the opposite side of grief. Perhaps it’s not simply that God wasn’t within the wind. (What would it not mean that he was “within the wind” anyway?) Rather, it’s that Elijah had lost the power to seek out him within the wind. The spectacles had grown too complicated, too haunted with loss. Elijah’s restless and grief-stricken heart needed silence on the opposite side of the storms of wind and fire to listen to and recognize the voice of God.
Elijah got here to Sinai despairing that his life and his dreams had come to an end. He left aware that the perfect parts of that dream—the hope of a renewed and restored Israel—were in God’s hands and at all times had been. Seven thousand people Elijah had no idea existed remained faithful. The deeper awareness was that he needn’t cling to the outcomes of whatever followed. The old cliché “God is on top of things” seems to be true, nevertheless it could also be something we only truly learn and that only liberates us after things disintegrate.
Like disillusionment, despair is a disease just for true believers—dreamers and lovers. It hits when life falls apart, our sense of meaning and purpose fades when the people closest to us change into incomprehensible or those we love disappear due to lies, brokenness, or death. Despair afflicts the lonely and forgotten, those whose prayers echo against a sky of concrete gray.
Those who’ve never known it themselves often encounter this deep darkness in others and are sometimes mystified by it. The temptation to moralize it’s powerful. “Put your hope in God,” the cry of the psalmist, can quickly change into, “Cheer up already,” a sentiment prone to only deepen despair by intensifying an individual’s sense that something is unsuitable with them, their pain is invisible, and so they are ultimately alone.
What we see at Sinai is each sobering and eager for each those that have suffered in spiritual darkness and people who love and need to support those suffering now. It concurrently reveals that there’s something solitary about that darkness and that, like Elijah’s journey first into the wilderness and ultimately to the cave on Sinai, the journey is taken alone.
Dante’s Inferno has long been understood as the best literary expression of this sort of encounter with disillusionment and despair. No one chooses exile and nobody chooses spiritual disillusionment. You simply awaken to seek out yourself there, wondering where the sunshine has gone and where to show next. In Inferno, Dante finds himself trapped between ravenous creatures and the gates of hell, discovering that the one way out of darkness is thru it.
So it’s with disillusionment. As much as we’d run from it or distract ourselves, it lurks just like the she-wolf and the leopard that hunted that great Italian poet. Our way out is right into a place we fear, a journey that for Dante meant bearing witness to the nice evils of the world on his approach to redemption in paradise.
For Elijah it meant finding solitude under the broom tree and on the fiery face of Mount Sinai. There he came upon what all of us can discover on the opposite side of grief—that he wasn’t alone. That under the noise of storms and the warmth of fires was the whisper of God, and that in the gap beyond us is at all times a remnant. We are never truly alone.
Mike Cosper is the director of CT Media.
Adapted from Land of My Sojourn by Mike Cosper. ©2024 by Michael D. Cosper. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
