“Shall I kill them?” says Israel’s king to the prophet Elisha in 2nd Kings chapter 6. Elisha the prophet had been Elijah’s servant, and when Elijah was taken up in a chariot of fire, Elisha had inherited his mantle. The Hebrew culture was set up with three primary offices: prophet, priest, and king. And the king answers to the prophet. David was a king and a prophet, but even he answered to Nathan regarding Bathsheba, if you remember.  

After Solomon’s son, Rehoboam split Israel in two, Israel in the north, with its capital in Samaria and Judah in the South, with its capital in Jerusalem, Elisha was one of the prophets in the northern kingdom called Israel. In this particular story, he’s been warning Israel’s king about the king of Aram, who’s making war. “Be careful not to go such and such a way, the King of Aram is planning to be there,” Elisha would say, and so Israel kept eluding their enemy.  

This obviously frustrated the King of Aram, and he’s convinced there’s a mole – Israel must have some inside man in his ranks, it’s like they know his very thoughts; they anticipate every move! It’s the King of Aram’s own men who tell him about Elisha the prophet. So, the king sends an army to get Elisha!

It’s a fascinating scenario to me. One man is bent on war, determined to pick a fight with Israel, and this one man – God’s prophet – keeps pulling the rug out from under him. Naturally, the King decided to go after Elisha, and Elisha knows just how to defeat these warmongers, these men determined to make war against God’s prophet. Elisha waits for the army to approach. His servants are terrified, and they can’t figure out why their master is so calm. Elisha prays that they might see what he is seeing, and suddenly the reality of God’s supernatural army becomes visible to them. They had no idea the hosts of the Lord were even there. But they were.  

The King of Aram’s biggest and baddest are marching forward and Elisha prays that God blind them. They go blind. Elisha ends up leading the blind army directly into the heart of the capital city where they are captured. No battle is engaged, no one dies. They are all captured alive in the heart of enemy territory, and Israel’s king is licking his lips with delight! This is marvelous! His enemy has been delivered right to his doorstep, and he says, “Shall I kill them?” I can imagine him nodding his head excitedly toward Elisha, as if to say, “Right? It’s time to kill them, right?”

If I just stopped the story right there, how would you write the next few moments, if it were up to you? If this were a movie, and I hit pause right here, what happens next? How would you map out the trajectory of victory from this point forward?    

“It’s time to kill them right?” I often wonder what facial expression, tone of voice, and body language are going on when I read these passages. I imagine Elisha maybe looking startled or incredulous, furrowing his brow as if to say, “Kill them? What? Why would you kill them?” Elisha’s response is to cook the enemy army a big dinner and send them home. And that’s exactly what happens, and the raiding bands stop harassing Israel. At least they do for a time. Of course the next paragraph picks up with more of the same, humans doing what humans do when left to their own devices, which is to say their own vices.  

But for a moment in real human history, when he had them right where he wanted them, mercy stands up and says, “you could use war to end war, or you could offer kindness that might inspire a change of mind.”  

I don’t want to be naive. In any relationship, trust is not based on nothing. It’s based on good information about a person’s behaviour. So, I’m not saying that mercy and trust are the same thing. We can show mercy wisely to someone we don’t trust. We can be merciful to someone knowing we would never allow them to babysit our toddler.

The striking thing to me is that given a chance to strike, Elisha didn’t. There are other times when it goes differently, but it seems to me that even this show of mercy is a kind of prophetic enactment. Years later, Jesus would show mercy when I would have thought he’d strike. His disciples in the events of Holy Week certainly expected him to strike. Maybe they were like Israel’s eager king during Elisha’s time, “Shall we kill them?” I can see Peter cutting off the ear of Malchus. I wonder if Peter, a career fisherman, even had any training with a sword? Is this the clumsy strike of a man jumping to conclusions about the way Jesus was going to deal with his enemies? I don’t know.  

But, when Jesus reattached Malchus’s ear, I wonder if the same look of incredulity that spread across Elisha’s face, spread across Jesus’s? “A sword, Peter? Really?” and then turning, “Here, lemme see that ear.”  

Last week, I read Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ve had it on my shelf for years, and finally decided to sit down and read it. That sent me back to re-read Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”, which I love. Tolkien believed that a well-told story, even an invented story, could both be true and make truth available. Of course, the stories of Scripture are not inventions, but realities, as Tolkien himself would say to a soon-to-be-converted-to-Christianity C.S. Lewis during a late-night conversation. Tolkien pointed out that the myths Lewis loved all drew from and point to the Great Myth of which the Scriptures tell: a myth, which unlike all the others, really happened.

In Tolkien’s own invented myth, I wonder if this same element of Elisha’s mercy and Jesus’s ultimate mercy crop up. In the Lord of the Rings, Sauron is not defeated finally by might or battle-prowess. He is defeated by humility and mercy. If power and pride help to defeat Sauron, it is his own power and pride turned in on itself. To paraphrase Theoden, “Often evil is its own undoing.”  

Bilbo, Gandalf, and Frodo show mercy to Gollum. That mercy ends up being the key to Sauron’s defeat. And he is defeated, not by a direct assault, but merely by the removal of the weapon he had put all of his trust in – the ring. When Sauron’s weapon is judged by the fire, there is nothing left of him to endure. The pattern of mercy shows up across these stories as the true road to victory.

In the True Myth of Christianity, Jesus defeats sin, death, and the devil in similar fashion to Elisha’s treatment of Aram’s armies – he offers them a feast – his own flesh – and invites them to return, not to their old country, but home to himself.

This Easter, we are witnesses to a life strangely shaped by great powers that seem to us not to be powers at all, but weaknesses! We are onlookers at a baffling scene, where all we count as wisdom is upset by God’s apparent foolishness at the crucifixion. We’re all ready to swing our swords. “Shall we kill them?”

Pause the movie. What happens next?

This week’s links:

Matthew is going on tour Aug. 1 – Nov. 1, 2019. Find out more: www.matthewclark.net/houseconcerts

Check out the Spring Issue of The Cultivating Project: www.thecultivatingproject.com 

Listen to Matthew’s new Easter single, “Meet Me Here” on Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon.