2 Kings 6

The borrowed axe head sunk in Jordan is the chapter’s quiet keystone. A son of the prophets is felling a beam at the river when the iron flies off and sinks, and his cry is Alas, master! for it was borrowed. The iron is dead weight; it cannot rise. Then Elisha cuts a stick and casts it into the water, and the iron did swim. Wood thrown into the death-water raises what was lost.

Read it in the right key and the figure is unmistakable. Iron is the flesh — heavy, sunk, unable to lift itself. Jordan is the descender, the river of death and resurrection. And the thing that raises the dead iron is a piece of cut wood cast down into the water — the tree, the offering, the death of Christ entered into death itself so that what was borrowed and lost should come up again. Elisha means God is salvation, and his whole ministry is the salvation-of-Yahweh worked in figure.

The second movement is the army at Dothan. The Syrian king sends horses and chariots to take the prophet, and the servant wakes to a city ringed with enemies: Alas, my master! how shall we do? Elisha’s answer is the chapter’s great line — they that be with us are more than they that be with them — and then the prayer, Yahweh, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. The mountain is full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.

The unseen host is always the larger army. The flesh counts the chariots it can see and despairs; the eye opened by Yahweh sees the mountain already full. Elisha does not pray for more help. He prays that the servant might see the help that was there the whole time.

Elisha then prays the Syrians blind, leads them into Samaria, and — when the king of Israel would smite them — commands instead a feast: set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink, and go to their master. Mercy to the captured enemy; coals of fire heaped on the head. The bands of Syria came no more for a season.

Then the chapter turns black. Ben-hadad besieges Samaria and the famine is so sore that an ass’s head sells for silver and two women bargain to boil and eat their sons. The covenant curse of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 is being paid out to the letter — ye shall eat the flesh of your sons. The king tears his robe, and the people see sackcloth on his flesh beneath it, but his heart is not torn: he swears the prophet’s death and snarls, this evil is of Yahweh; what should I wait for Yahweh any longer? The flesh blames the Word for the famine its own sin has earned.

The iron cannot raise itself; the wood cast into the water raises it. Look up — the mountain is already full of fire.

Lamentations 2

This is the second of the five laments, and its terror is that the destroyer is named: Yahweh himself. Adonai was as an enemy: he hath swallowed up Israel. The acrostic marches grimly through the alphabet — every letter another stroke — and every stroke is traced not to Babylon but to the hand of Yahweh in righteous anger. He hath bent his bow like an enemy. This is not random calamity; it is covenant judgment, deliberate and just.

The blow falls hardest on the holy things. Yahweh has cast down the tabernacle as if it were a garden booth — he hath violently taken away his tabernacle, as if it were of a garden — and has made the appointed feasts and sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion. The altar is cast off, the sanctuary abhorred. The very things meant to be the meeting-place of mercy are swept away when the people made them a cover for sin.

The prophets are silenced: her prophets also find no vision from Yahweh. The lying prophets are the named cause of the ruin: thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee (2:14), daubing false burdens over the people’s iniquity instead of uncovering it, so that a word which flattered left the city defenceless when the siege came. The elders sit on the ground and keep silence. And the famine of 2 Kings 6 reappears here in the lament — the women eat their fruit, the children of a span long — the same curse, now wept over rather than reported.

The mockery is its own wound. All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem — the city once called the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth, now a thing to wag the head at. It is the very posture the passers-by will take at the place of the skull, wagging their heads at the crucified King (Matt 27:39); the mocked daughter of Zion prefigures her mocked Lord. And Jeremiah’s lament over the first fall foreshadows the Lord’s own oratorio of woe over the same city — your house is left unto you desolate (Matt 23:38) — the second dissolution by Rome answering the first by Babylon. And there is no healer in the chapter — thy breach is great like the sea: who can heal thee?

Against the silence and the hissing the prophet urges the one thing still possible: Arise, cry out in the night… pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord. When every other refuge is gone — sanctuary, prophet, king — the cry to Yahweh is still open.

When the sanctuary itself is cast down, the door of prayer is not. Pour out the heart like water.

1 Corinthians 15

Here is the answer to every death in today’s readings, set out as the spine of the gospel itself. Paul rehearses the message on which the saints stand: Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. Death, burial, resurrection — and the witnesses, above five hundred at once, most of them still living when Paul wrote.

And according to the scriptures is no vague gesture — the third-day rising was written into the types long before it happened. Isaac is received back as from the dead on the third day of the road to Moriah (Gen 22:4), in a figure (Heb 11:19); Hezekiah is told he shall go up to the house of Yahweh on the third day (2 Kings 20:5, 8); Jonah lies three days in the deep before he is cast up alive, the one sign the Lord claimed as his own (Jon 1:17; Matt 12:40). The grave could not hold the firstfruits, because the pattern had already refused to hold its types.

Then he presses the unbearable alternative. If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain… ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. Mark the framework: the dead are asleep, and without resurrection they are not in heaven — they have perished. There is no immortal soul carrying on elsewhere. The whole hope hangs on the awakening, and the awakening hangs on Christ.

Christ is the firstfruits, and the firstfruits fixes the order of the whole harvest. Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. Then cometh the end. The risen Lord is the first sheaf; the saints are raised not at death but at his coming. And the last enemy to be put down is the one that has stalked through all three readings today: the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

The chapter turns on the two heads of the two humanities. As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. And the controlling principle of all true reading is stated outright: that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The natural Adam, the natural body, the natural Israel — all real, all first, all shadowing the spiritual that comes after.

So the body is sown in corruption and raised in incorruption, sown in weakness and raised in power. At the last trump the dead are raised incorruptible and the living changed. Only then is the taunt earned: O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sunk iron rises; the swallowed-up daughter of Zion is not the last word.

The firstfruits is risen; the harvest is sure. The dead in Christ do not perish — they sleep, and they wait for his coming.