Ecclesiasticus 48:1-10; Matthew 17:9-23

Elijah burst onto the pages of Ecclesiasticus in the same way that he burst into the life of the people of Israel when he confronted King Ahab and asserted that it would not rain again until he said so.

He is described in our Old Testament reading as a prophet like fire, and one whose life on earth was full of fire, and of course it ended in a whirlwind of fire as he was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire.

Elijah is not gentle, he is not safe, he is not polite. He is a prophet whose words of truth burned away all false illusions and beliefs, and who exposed the falseness of the god Baal, as he confronted Baal’s power again and again.

I expect that many of us know Elijah’s story quite well. It begins with him announcing God’s judgement of drought on the whole country. During the drought he himself is given bed-and-breakfast by a widow in a place called Zarephath, a coastal town between Tyre and Sidon, well away from the king and his entourage. There he restored the widow’s son to life after he had died. Then came the dramatic encounter at Mount Carmel, where he challenged the prophets of Baal to call on their god to set fire to a sacrifice on an altar dedicated to him. He mocked their inability to produce anything. Then he got them to pour water all over his sacrifice, and he called on the one true God to light the fire on the altar dedicated to him. And the fire fell.

The prophets of Baal were slaughtered, and the drought came to an end. But Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, a worshipper of Baal, threatened Elijah’s life and so he ran away.

He ended up hiding in a cave on another mountain, Mount Horeb. And God promised to meet with him there. So he came out to the mouth of the cave, and there he witnessed first an earthquake, then a mighty wind and then fire. But we read that God was not in any of those dramatic displays. But then came what is described as the sound of sheer silence. In that silence Elijah again encountered God, and he was told what he should do next.

The end of his life on this earth was unusual in that he did not die, but was carried away in a chariot of fire into the heavens.

Because of that extraordinary ending, a belief grew up among God’s people, that Elijah would return to earth immediately before the promised Messiah came.

The very last verses of the Old Testament tell us all about that. Malachi 4:5 says “Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents”. That is quoted in Ecclesiasticus that was read to us.

There was also another long standing expectation amongst God’s people that came from the time of Moses. We read in Deuteronomy 18:15 that Moses looking to the future prophesied that God would raise up a prophet like him.

All of which brings us seamlessly to today’s New Testament reading from Matthew’s gospel. This morning, we heard the preceding verses in that chapter read, and they take us to yet another mountain, probably Mount Tabor, and describe what we know as the Transfiguration of Jesus. Three of the disciples had been invited by Jesus to go up the mountain with him, and there they saw Jesus transfigured. We read that his face shone like the sun and his clothes became dazzling white. A reminder, perhaps, of what happened when God met and spoke with Moses and his face shone. And then there was a cloud overshadowing them. Another reminder of how God led his people in the wilderness by a pillar of cloud.

And so we read that the disciples saw Jesus speaking together with people they identify as Moses and Elijah; and they heard the voice of God speaking from that cloud saying: “this is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased, listen to him”. Tim spoke this morning about what it means to truly listen.

As they left the mountain, the disciples asked Jesus about this, and what was meant when people said that Elijah would come before the Messiah. Jesus explained that indeed Elijah had come, and that when John the Baptist spoke about preparing the way, that was the fulfilment of that expectation.

And so they came down from that wonderful experience on the mountain to find themselves in a very different place – a place of suffering, confusion and failure. They met a distraught father and his tormented child whom the disciples had been unable to help.

So we see that the Transfiguration was a moment of true glory but was not the destination. There on the mountain the disciples had witnessed that Jesus, the beloved Son of the Father, was indeed the fulfilment of all that the law and the prophets, Moses and Elijah, had looked forward to. But there was much yet to come. The road away from the mountain was leading to Jerusalem, to rejection, to suffering, and to the death on the cross.

Elijah could not remain on Mount Carmel, Jesus could not remain on Mount Tabor, and faith always needs to come down from the mountain into the cave and into the valley. Into the places where there are distraught parents and tormented children, where there is much grief, anxiety, doubt, where there is illness, exhaustion, despair, and where our prayers seem to go unanswered. Into the places we inhabit day by day.

And just as Elijah had to learn to hear God in the silence as much as to observe him in the fire, so the disciples had to learn the nature of simple faith, though as small as a grain of mustard, was a faith that was rooted in God.

So, what does Jesus mean when he speaks about having enough faith to command mountains to uproot and throw themselves into the sea?

He is obviously using a metaphor; he is not expecting anyone to actually pray for mountains to move; but he is speaking about the potentially great impact of simple faith.

What is clear from our two readings is that such true faith, such simple faith is not about noise, or about volume, it is about silence and mustard seeds. It is not about things that we want in the material world. It is about spiritual things, about our relationship with God, about growing and developing that relationship with him, and about letting God change the things that get in the way of that for us and others – hindrances, obstacles of one sort or another – the things that stop us following Jesus more closely and becoming more like him day by day.

In prayer, in silence, with the simplest of trust that he will keep that promise that if we draw close to him he will draw close to us; with that simple faith we find things within and without shifting, and we find that God becomes more real, and that we can get to know God more closely.

Amen.