This week's series of guest Lent Art posts continue with a reflection by Rev. Cheryl Meban, Presbyterian Chaplain to Ulster University on the illumination by Jean Bondol de Bruges of Elisha raising the son of the Shunammite woman, which asks questions of the artist, the text and us.
One day Elisha went to Shunem. And a well-to-do woman was there, who urged him to stay for a meal. So whenever he came by, he stopped there to eat. She said to her husband, “I know that this man who often comes our way is a holy man of God. Let’s make a small room on the roof and put in it a bed and a table, a chair and a lamp for him. Then he can stay there whenever he comes to us.”
One day when Elisha came, he went up to his room and lay down there. He said to his servant Gehazi, “Call the Shunammite.” So he called her, and she stood before him. Elisha said to him, “Tell her, ‘You have gone to all this trouble for us. Now what can be done for you? Can we speak on your behalf to the king or the commander of the army?’”
She replied, “I have a home among my own people.”
“What can be done for her?” Elisha asked.
Gehazi said, “She has no son, and her husband is old.”
Then Elisha said, “Call her.” So he called her, and she stood in the doorway. “About this time next year,” Elisha said, “you will hold a son in your arms.”
“No, my lord!” she objected. “Please, man of God, don’t mislead your servant!”
But the woman became pregnant, and the next year about that same time she gave birth to a son, just as Elisha had told her.
The child grew, and one day he went out to his father, who was with the reapers. He said to his father, “My head! My head!”
His father told a servant, “Carry him to his mother.” After the servant had lifted him up and carried him to his mother, the boy sat on her lap until noon, and then he died. She went up and laid him on the bed of the man of God, then shut the door and went out.
She called her husband and said, “Please send me one of the servants and a donkey so I can go to the man of God quickly and return.”
“Why go to him today?” he asked. “It’s not the New Moon or the Sabbath.”
“That’s all right,” she said.
She saddled the donkey and said to her servant, “Lead on; don’t slow down for me unless I tell you.”
So she set out and came to the man of God at Mount Carmel.
When he saw her in the distance, the man of God said to his servant Gehazi, “Look! There’s the Shunammite! Run to meet her and ask her, ‘Are you all right? Is your husband all right? Is your child all right?’”
“Everything is all right,” she said.
When she reached the man of God at the mountain, she took hold of his feet. Gehazi came over to push her away, but the man of God said, “Leave her alone! She is in bitter distress, but the Lord has hidden it from me and has not told me why.”
“Did I ask you for a son, my lord?” she said. “Didn’t I tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes’?”
Elisha said to Gehazi, “Tuck your cloak into your belt, take my staff in your hand and run. Don’t greet anyone you meet, and if anyone greets you, do not answer. Lay my staff on the boy’s face.”
But the child’s mother said, “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.” So he got up and followed her.
Gehazi went on ahead and laid the staff on the boy’s face, but there was no sound or response. So Gehazi went back to meet Elisha and told him, “The boy has not awakened.”
When Elisha reached the house, there was the boy lying dead on his couch. He went in, shut the door on the two of them and prayed to the Lord. Then he got on the bed and lay on the boy, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands. As he stretched himself out on him, the boy’s body grew warm.
Elisha turned away and walked back and forth in the room and then got on the bed and stretched out on him once more. The boy sneezed seven times and opened his eyes.
Elisha summoned Gehazi and said, “Call the Shunammite.” And he did. When she came, he said, “Take your son.” She came in, fell at his feet and bowed to the ground. Then she took her son and went out.
2 Kings 4.8-37 (NIV)
The mother’s head is strained as far forward as the child’s is strained back
The angles are all wrong. The child’s wrists are twisted, Elisha’s arms strain to hold the child, who looks as if he is floating between life and death. Or is Elisha raising the child, trying to bring him to life, but head lolling backwards? Look at the faces. The child’s deathly pale. The prophet’s, earnest, intent and resolute. The mother’s, eyes hardly bearing to look, mouth set ready for despair, while her whole body reaches for hope for her son, hands clasped, pleading in prayer.
During this lent, here in Northern Ireland, we are more than normally aware of our closeness to death – our own, our loved ones, our community’s. In a culture in conflict (1969-98) we heard daily death tolls, news of bombings, shootings, beatings, and they became part of a ‘normal’ we tolerated because we had no choice… and we hardly dared to hope, when in 1998 we got our “Good Friday Agreement” that daily premature deaths would be a thing of the past.
As the childless Shunammite woman said to Elisha, “Don’t get my hopes up.” And then this son was born – an heir for her elderly husband, and a provider for herself in her old age. A few brief years of hope take root, until one day, out working or playing with his father, the son suffers extreme headaches. His father sends him home to his mother. (Really? Father doesn’t carry him, go with him or stay with him? Is father too busy managing the fields? Maybe the workers need their day’s pay in order to provide for their own families… and the father relinquishes his own son to care for those of his labourers…Perhaps.)
The woman cradles the sick child till he dies in her arms. Lays him on a bed upstairs in the room she keeps for the prophet Elisha. Closes the door and sends for her husband. She doesn’t tell him what’s happened. He apparently doesn’t ask. She just asks her husband for a servant and donkey so she can go to see Elisha. Her husband doesn’t see why she would want to see the Holy Man on an ordinary weekday, and doesn’t think to connect it to his son. (Men, please note, there are times when your wife wants you to notice and care about what’s happening in your own family!)
The woman seems to know her husband’s carelessness. But rather than be resigned, as she had been to her childlessness, her whole energy is directed towards this child. If his dad won’t, then she’s determined to make the prophet responsible for saving the child. From relatively contented childless woman, she becomes a demanding advocate for life.
She doesn’t tell anyone the child is dead (or unconscious?). Maybe she’s wise. She could send for Elisha but he might not come. She could go to Elisha, but that would leave the child’s body in the care of servants or others. She can’t risk it. Only Elisha can be trusted. The child’s dead. Don’t let him be pawed over by mourning relatives until she has exhausted every other possibility. Don’t tell anyone the child has died. If her husband were to succumb to the same sudden illness, she’d be left alone, and if there’s no son to inherit, in-laws can be quick to repossess their family farms. She doesn’t tell the child’s father. She won’t tell Elisha’s servant. She’ll tell Elisha herself. No rumours. No interference.
Elisha doesn’t get it at first. But he at least understands and pays attention to her anguish. He tries, though, to send Gehazi ahead with the staff, but she won’t leave till the prophet agrees to follow her himself. She only relinquishes control when Elisha is with her son. And what strange authority he has. To pray, then lie on top of the child, then pray.
Elisha’s actions, so clearly described in the text are not reflected in the image here. Is the uncanny intimacy described in the text just too difficult to depict? “He got on the bed and lay on the boy, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands.” In OUR culture rife with sexuality and its subversions, it sounds like a nightmare of the worst abuses of spiritual and sexual abuse. The Bible does talk about abuse. Could it ever be life-giving? Maybe the lack of clarity here provides a community with opportunities to discuss what happens, without fear of stigma silencing victims. No spiritual heroes are exempt. We struggle to distinguish intimacy from abuse. Let’s hope Elisha knew the difference.
Was the boy’s headache a migraine? A seizure? A haemorrhage? A virus? How could any of these be cured by Elisha’s actions? Especially if they have led to such shallow breathing and coldness that it seems the child has died.
Does the physical intimacy of a father-like figure, the warmth, the strength, the whole life commitment implied by the physical laying of one body on top of the other, somehow symbolise the power of a good man to step in physically and emotionally for a distracted or absent father? Why does the artist choose to set aside that graphic description?
Something inexplicable happened. That’s why the story has been told and retold until it was written down. A boy dead, or as good as dead, received back his life, and a mother her son, by the physical commitment and presence of a person who speaks for God.
In our current circumstances, where physical contact is a huge risk, there will be times when people will take huge risks to save others. There is no guarantee of the outcome. And in our culture again tuning in daily to listen to death tolls, there will again be a hope and a future of a different kind of normal.
PRAYER
Heavenly Father, we cry to you for help, and at times you seem distant, uncaring.
Give us to mothers who will sit with us in our pain, hold us until it passes.
Heavenly Father, while we cry to you for help, we trust you also to care for the many other families for whom you provide.
Give to them their daily bread, the means to provide and let your apparent absence drive us to seek more urgently for the love we need from you.
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| Rev. Cheryl Meban |
Heavenly Father, we lie helpless, as good as dead, unable to fend for ourselves
Give us others who fight for us, send for help, and go themselves to the source of our life
Heavenly Father, come to us in our sickness – of body, mind, and culture
Give us the warmth of your Living Body With Us, your breath in our lungs, our hands in your hands, your eyes seeing life in our unseeing eyes
Give us to mothers who will rejoice in our life till we hold them in their frailty, sit with them till they pass.
Give us to fathers who learn to love as you have loved us.
Give us renewed society, renewed life and a new normal.
AMEN
Selah
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