The Call of Elisha
19 So Elijah went from there and found Elisha son of Shaphat.
The call of Elisha was condemned by some of the Jewish Rabbis in later (I should say, more recent) years. In the twelfth century, Rabbi Raschi (Solomon Ben Isaac Jarchi) wrote: “Thy prophecy does not please me, because thou art the constant accuser of my children” (Transl. by Adam Clarke, c. 1830). The Rabbi’s complaint is that he didn’t like Elijah and Elisha constantly condemning the kings and people of the northern tribes because they were people of the covenant (“my children”). The Rabbi’s complaint is actually with God; not the prophets. The people of Israel had turned away from God and rejected him utterly, and by condemning the Lord’s prophets, the Rabbi has rejected God in exactly the same way that Ahab and Jezebel had done.
He was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen, and he himself was driving the twelfth pair. Elijah went up to him and threw his cloak around him. 20 Elisha then left his oxen and ran after Elijah. “Let me kiss my father and mother goodbye,” he said, “and then I will come with you.”
In the 1930’s (A.D.), Dorothy Tollefson was out for a walk with another young woman near Chilton, Wisconsin, when a handsome young man in a spiffy green Studebaker drove by, honked (a good old fashioned ah-OOO-gah!), and stopped. His name was Othmar; his friends called him “Ott” or “Otts.” Dorothy smiled at him, and when he flipped open the passenger door, the girls stepped in (what would their mothers have said?) and the three of them (there may have been more than three in the car) went for a little drive through Chilton’s beautiful 1930’s countryside. She hadn’t planned it. She hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning thinking, “I’ll meet my husband today,” but she did. That’s how my grandparents met.
In the 870’s (B.C.), Shaphat’s son Elisha was driving oxen that day in his dad’s field. He wasn’t just “having” the work done, he was handling some of the hardest work himself. Scholars don’t really know where the field was, but it might have been close to the Jordan about midway between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea (that’s where the maps make their guess). One of the judges, Gideon, had won a victory there (Judges 7:22) and David’s first wife Michal was given away by her father to a man named Adriel who was from there. Elisha hadn’t planned it. He hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning thinking, “I’ll become a prophet today,” but he did. That’s how Elijah and Elisha met.
While Elisha was plowing, Elijah the Tishbite strode across the newly turned loam and draped his cloak over Elisha’s shoulders. It was an investiture. No words that we know of were spoken; no explanations. But Elisha knew what this meant. He was under the prophet’s cloak—probably a rough, hairy goat-skin thing. Elisha had just been called to be a prophet.
He was still a young man. He wasn’t married yet, and his first thought was of his parents at home. “Let me go and kiss them goodbye.” New Testament Christians sometimes get a little worked up over Elisha’s request to go back home, and I understand why. But let’s let Elijah answer him:
“Go back,” Elijah replied. “What have I done to you?” (NIV)
This story is bound to remind a Christian of an incident that happened with Jesus. As the Lord was walking through Samaria (was it close to where Elisha was plowing?) a man said to him, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family” (Luke 9:61). Jesus’ reply was, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of heaven” (Luke 9:62).
Let’s be careful about these passages. They have less in common than it seems.
Elisha was ready to follow Elijah without question, and his goodbye to his family showed that he was going to do whatever it took to be the prophet he had been called to be. To me, this explains what was behind Elijah’s enigmatic sigh, What have I done to you? Elijah knew Jezebel and her family well. Now that this farm kid was brought into the Lord’s bullpen, did he really understand what lay ahead? But the Lord is free to use all of us in his own way for his kingdom. It isn’t our place to question him, but to serve him where we are.
How will you serve your Savior today?
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.
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