The Rev Dr Margaret Forrester considers the message of 1 Kings 17:1–16.

STUDY

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ELIJAH, on the run from King Ahab, survives by drinking from a burn and being given food by ravens or Bedouin people.

The Hebrew word crybym is difficult to translate. Pronounced one way it means ‘ravens’. Pronounced another way it means Arabs or Bedouin. Take your pick. Either way it was pretty amazing. Then water and food dry up and Elijah moves on.

In the same area there is a widow with a small boy. Surrounded by drought, famine, dead animals, she is at the end of her tether. She has some olive oil. She has some meal in a jar. We can imagine how each day she uses less and less in her food preparation.

She goes outside the town, gathering a few scraps of dead wood, twigs, grasses. Enough to heat up a flat stone, something like a pizza stone, so that the flat bread could be at least partially cooked.

And she is confronted by this wild man who had apparently lived in desert places for three years. Elijah must have been filthy, stinking, with torn clothes, and matted beard. She saw a gaunt, dishevelled, wild eyed man, light headed with hunger, lurching towards her.

He called for water, and she gave him something to drink. Then he asked her to feed him.

Eastern traditions of hospitality are strong. But to be blunt she had to choose between this maniac and her son. Then the man urged her: ‘Make your cake of meal and oil, but make one for me first. Please. Please.’

Every time I hear or read this story, memory holds the door.

It is during WW2. My mother, home from the village school where she taught, stands in our old fashioned kitchen with an open range fire and oven.

She mixes a cup of oatmeal, half a cup of flour, a pinch of salt and some bacon fat saved from Sunday breakfast. Maybe a dash of hot water, working fast, rolling the paste then cutting into triangles and firing them on the girdle. They come off slightly brown and curled at the edges. Maybe there is a scrape of home made apple jelly. Yum.

What is the woman thinking? ‘I shall turn him away. No-one will see.’

Maybe, just maybe there was enough meal for three cakes. Maybe she had a little bit more than she had acknowledged. And here is the miracle.

It is not necessarily about miraculous multiplication. It is about finding common humanity.

She turns from averting her eyes to seeing. She turns from hostility to hospitality. She becomes human.

‘Come. Sit down.’

Yes, a miracle is promised. And yes, the meal and the oil do not give out.

But the miracle, the wonder, is that at her lowest ebb, she could reach out to someone in need.

She did something more lastingly important than Elijah.

Elijah had run away.

Elijah was sponging from others.

But the hungry mother gives us a model of timeless significance:

Compassion for the lonely,

the foreigner,

the hungry,

the homeless – and we do not know her name.

The widow of Sarepta prefigures another story which is the bedrock of our faith. As we read of her preparation for her last meal, we remember that at the last meal of Jesus he shared bread and wine with a comrade who would betray him, and with a friend who would deny him, and with a colleague who would doubt him.

This woman points us to the hospitality of God in Jesus, and we do not know her name.

Dear God

may we open our eyes to see the foreigner, and those who appear strange.

Help us to open our wallets and hearts for the hungry and the homeless.

Open our ears that we may hear the stories of others and our minds that we may learn something new.

Thank you for showing us the Lebanese woman,

the woman from Sarepta,

whose name we do not know.

Amen.