Elisha and the Chariots of Fire at Dothan

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It is early in the morning, and a young man has climbed up onto a flat roof to have a look at the weather, and the weather has been replaced.

Yesterday, when he went to bed, there was a small town on a hill, and some fields, and a lot of quiet. This morning there is all of that, and in addition there are horses. Hundreds of horses. And chariots, and soldiers, and the soldiers' tents, in a great ring, all the way around the town, as if somebody had come in the night and drawn a circle in the dust with an army.

He is, I think, going to have a bad few minutes.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us start, as the old book does, with something smaller, and a good deal wetter.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the second book of Kings, chapter six, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the smell of the wood, the talk of the young men, what a servant might have thought on a roof, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

You may remember Elisha. If you have been listening for a while you will have met him already: the prophet who took up the cloak of Elijah, who helped a widow fill every jar in her house with oil, who sent a proud and sick commander down to wash in a muddy river. He is by now an older man, a person people come to when something has gone wrong, and he has a kind of household around him, a company of younger people who have given their lives to prayer and to learning from him. The old book calls them the sons of the prophets. Think of them as a very devout and very cheerful sort of student body.

And they have a problem, which is that their house is too small.

"Look," they say to Elisha one day, "the place where we live under your direction is too small for us. Let us go to the Jordan, and each of us will take a beam from there, and let us build a place there where we can live."

It is a lovely, practical, ordinary request. They do not ask for a miracle. They do not ask to be given a building. They propose to walk down to the river, which has trees along its banks, and to cut the timber themselves, and to build their own house with their own hands. And Elisha, who has known a good many people who would rather have had a miracle than a plan, says, "Go."

And then one of them says something that I find very kind. He says, "Please, will you come with us?"

And Elisha says, "I will go."

So off they go, the whole cheerful crowd of them, down the road to the Jordan, and I would like you to imagine it, because it is a good morning. It is a working day, the sort when everyone has a task and the air smells of cut green wood and river mud. There are birds. There are young men with axes over their shoulders, arguing amiably about which tree is the straightest, and one of them is telling a story that nobody is listening to, and the river is moving along beside them, brown and quiet, as it has done since long before any of them were born.

And then they start to cut. Thwack. Thwack. Chips fly. A tree leans, and groans, and falls, and somebody shouts that it nearly got the donkey, and somebody else says the donkey is fine, and the work goes on, and the morning goes on, and the beams begin to pile up on the bank.

And then, quite suddenly, there is a different sound. Not a thwack. A kind of small, final plop.

One of the young men had been working at the edge of the water, swinging his axe at a tree that grew right over the river. And the head of his axe, which was iron, and which was not held on to the handle as tightly as it ought to have been, which happens, slipped off its handle in the middle of a swing, and flew out, and went into the water, and sank.

He is holding the handle. Only the handle.

And he cries out. This is the part of the story I love, because of what he says. He does not say, "My axe is lost." He says, "Alas, my master! It was borrowed!"

It was borrowed.

Oh, I do feel for him. You know that feeling. It is not enough to have broken something. It is somebody else's. You can see the face of the person you borrowed it from. You can hear yourself saying, "I'll take such good care of it." And you are standing on a riverbank holding a stick, and the river is a good deal deeper than your pocket.

Now, Elisha does not tell him that he should have been more careful. He does not give a talk about tying on axe heads. He asks one practical question. He says, "Where did it fall?"

And the young man shows him the place. And Elisha cuts off a stick, and throws it in at that spot. And the iron floats.

That is all the text says, and I am going to say it just as plainly. The iron floated. Iron does not float, as you and I and the young man with the handle all know very well. But this is the sort of day it is. The axe head rises up out of the brown water and sits there on the top of the river like a small grey leaf.

"Pick it up," says Elisha.

And the man put out his hand, and took it.

That is the end of that little story. Nobody makes a speech. Nobody is awed or frightened. It is, if you like, the quietest miracle in the whole of Scripture, performed for the smallest reason, over somebody else's axe. And I think it is there, tucked in among the larger stories, to tell us something about what kind of God Elisha is serving. A God who is paying attention to a borrowed axe. A God who knows it matters to a young man, and to whoever lent it, and who is willing to lift a bit of iron out of a river so that one person does not have to go home ashamed.

If you have a small worry tonight, one so small that you feel silly mentioning it, please do mention it. It turns out that small things are not too small.

Now let us leave the river, and the young men, and go to a part of the story that is about something much bigger. And to do that I need to tell you about a war.

You see, in those days the kingdom of Israel had a neighbour to the north called Aram, and the two of them were not friends. The king of Aram was at war with the king of Israel, and as the book tells it, he was making a plan. He sat down with his officers and he said, "At such and such a place shall be my camp." He was going to hide soldiers there and surprise the Israelites when they came by.

And a day or two later, a messenger came to the king of Israel. And the message was from Elisha, and it said: "Beware that you do not pass this place, for the Arameans are going down there."

So the king of Israel did not go that way. He sent a man to look at the place Elisha had named, and the man looked, and there they were. The soldiers were waiting. And the king was warned, and went somewhere else.

And that happened once. And that happened again. And the book says that it happened, not once or twice, but several times. Every time the king of Aram laid a trap, the king of Israel was not there to walk into it.

Now, you can imagine how this goes down, in a palace in Aram. Imagine being the king, with your maps and your officers, and every plan you make is known. The king of Aram becomes very angry, and very puzzled. The text says his heart was enraged. He calls all of his servants together and he says to them, "Will you not show me who of us is for the king of Israel?"

He thinks he has a traitor. He thinks somebody in this very room is passing notes. And it is a sad thing, a king looking around at his own friends and wondering which of them it is.

Then one of his servants says, "None, my lord the king. It is Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, who tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedchamber."

In your bedchamber! Not in the council hall. Not on the battlefield. In your bedroom, with the door shut, in the quiet. There is not a single place in the world where this king can say a thing to himself and be sure that God is not listening.

I want to put in a word here for the king of Aram, because the story is often told as if he were simply a villain, and I think he is a person in a muddle. He has an army. He has a plan. He has found, to his bewilderment, that he is in a contest he cannot win, with an old man in a small town. And he does the thing that a worried king does. He sends for more soldiers.

"Go and see where he is," says the king, "that I may send and seize him."

And they tell him. "He is in Dothan."

Dothan is a small town in the hills. If you have been listening to the stories from Genesis, you may know it. It is where Joseph's brothers took their flocks, many years before, and where the boy with the long-sleeved coat caught up with them. It is a quiet sort of place. A place for sheep. And it is now about to have the most unusual night of its history.

So the king of Aram sends horses and chariots and a great army. A great army, to catch one old man. They set out under cover of darkness, and they come by night, and they surround the city.

Let us go, now, to the town of Dothan, in the dark, while it sleeps.

It is the sleepiest hour. The streets are empty. A dog turns over and sighs. Somewhere a baby wakes, and is hushed, and sleeps again. And all along the hills, one soldier at a time, in silence, the army of Aram is taking its place. A man holds a horse's nose so that it will not whinny. A chariot is eased up a slope on its wheels, inch by inch. Nobody speaks. By the time the grey of the dawn comes up, the ring is closed.

And now we come back to the young man on the roof.

The book says that the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out. That is all it tells us about him. It does not give his name. I find that I rather like that, because he could be anyone. He could be you. He is simply the person who gets up first, as there always is, to see to the water and the fire and the day, and who steps out onto the roof with the sleep still on his face. Perhaps he is yawning. Perhaps he is thinking about breakfast.

And he looks. And there, on every side of the city, there are horses and chariots and soldiers, so many that there is no gap to slip through, and no road, and no direction in which he could run.

I do not think he says anything for a moment. And then he comes running down the stairs, and he finds Elisha, and he says the most natural thing in the world.

"Alas, my master! What shall we do?"

Did you notice that it is almost the same thing that the young man at the river said? "Alas, my master!" It is what people say, in the old book, when they have looked at the size of a trouble and then looked at the size of themselves. And it is exactly the right thing to say. He doesn't pretend. He doesn't put on a brave face. He goes straight to the person he trusts, and tells him the truth, which is that he is frightened. And he asks what to do.

Now. I want you to picture Elisha at this moment. He has been woken by his servant, and he has been told that an army is outside the walls. Does he leap up? Does he run for his sandals? Does he send for the guard?

He does not. The book says that he answered, and what he said is one of the most loved sentences in the whole Old Testament.

"Do not be afraid," he said, "for those who are with us are more than those who are with them."

And if you had been the servant, standing in a doorway, with horses all round the hill, you might have thought, with respect, that Elisha had miscounted. Because from where the young man stood, it was one prophet, one servant, and a few sleepy people in their beds, against an army. And the prophet seems to be saying that we have more.

But he is not finished. Because he doesn't just say it and stand there looking calm. He prays.

And he prays for something very particular. He doesn't pray, "Lord, make the army go away." He doesn't even pray, "Lord, send help." He says, "O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see."

Please open his eyes.

That's the whole request. Elisha is not asking for something to be added to the world. He is asking for something to be taken off the young man's sight. For the veil, if I may put it so, to be lifted for a moment. Because what he has been saying is not a comfort. It is a description. It is already so.

And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw.

And here is what the old book says he saw. I will say it the way it says it, and then I will be quiet for a moment.

"And behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha."

The mountain was full.

Not the army of Aram, which was there too, down on the plain, in the grey light, with its tents and its tired horses. Above them. Around Elisha. All round the hill where the little town was sitting, there was a second army, one that had not needed to creep up in the night because it had been standing there the whole time. Horses and chariots, and the book says they were of fire. Not burning anything. Not threatening anyone. Simply there, in ranks, encircling the circle. A ring around the ring.

I would love to tell you what the young man's face did. The book does not say. I imagine that his mouth opened, and that for a little while nothing came out of it, and that he put his hand out behind him for the doorframe. And I imagine that the fear, which had been so large a moment ago, was suddenly the wrong size. It was still there. But it was a small thing, now, at the bottom of a very big view.

The old book does not say what these horses and chariots are. It does not call them angels. But the Church has very often read it that way. There is a verse in the Psalms, "The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them," and Christians have long heard that verse standing behind this one. The people who guard us are more than the people who threaten us. They are always there, and mostly we are not shown. You may recall that angels, in our stories, are not people who have died, and are not wizards, and do not need us to be afraid of them. They are servants of God, at their posts, a great deal more numerous than we suppose.

So tonight, when you close your eyes, and the house makes its small night noises, and the dark seems very large, here is a thought for the edge of sleep. Of all the things that are around you, in the dark, the great majority are on your side.

Now, you might think that is where the story would end. The servant has been reassured, the army has been seen to be outmatched. But the old book has a way of going on a little past where you expect, and what it does next is, to my mind, the most surprising part.

The Arameans come down toward Elisha. They have their orders. They are going to take the prophet. And Elisha prays again. And this time he prays: "Please strike this people with blindness."

And the Lord struck them with blindness, in accordance with the prayer of Elisha.

Now, I should tell you something about that word. The word in the Hebrew is not the word for the blindness of someone who cannot see anything at all. It is a rarer word, one that is used only in one other place in the whole Bible, and it seems to mean something like dazzlement, or a bewilderment of the sight. They can see. They just cannot see properly. A man who has been told he is walking toward a prophet in a house on the hill finds that he does not recognise a thing, and that no landmark is where it ought to be, and that the person in front of him is just an old man with a kind face, and he is not sure if it is the right one.

And the old man says to them, quite pleasantly, "This is not the way, and this is not the city. Follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom you seek."

I would like you to enjoy this. I do not think it is a lie, exactly, in the sense of a trap, because the man they were seeking, they do find. It is more like a gentle joke told by someone who is not at all afraid. Elisha takes an entire army by the hand, so to speak, and walks them down a road, and they follow him, because they cannot see where else to go.

And where does he lead them?

To Samaria. To the capital. To the very city of the king of Israel.

Think of how that looks from the other side. The king of Israel is in his city, and he has just had word that a great company of Aramean soldiers is walking in through his gate behind a prophet. He is, I should think, rather startled. The soldiers are the same ones who have been laying ambushes for him for months. And now they are in his city, bewildered, in a crowd, in the middle of the street, with their weapons, and no clear idea of what town they are in.

And as soon as they are inside the walls, Elisha prays again. "O Lord, open the eyes of these men, that they may see."

The Lord opened their eyes, and they saw. And they were in the midst of Samaria.

Imagine that moment, soldiers blinking in the light, looking up at the streets of the very city they had meant to attack, and looking at one another. A whole army with nothing in its hand.

And the king of Israel, who is watching all this, says to Elisha something that is lovely in its own way. He calls him "my father." "My father," he says, "shall I strike them down? Shall I strike them down?"

He asks it twice. You can hear that he is excited. Here they are. Here is the army that has been a danger to him for so long, delivered into his city with no weapon drawn, and every soldier of his must be thinking the same thing. Here is the enemy. And what a chance.

And Elisha says: "You shall not strike them down."

And then he says something that I think is one of the wisest things in the whole book. He says, "Would you strike down those whom you have taken captive with your sword and your bow? Set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink and go to their master."

Bread and water.

That is the end of the war, in this story. Not a victory. A dinner.

And the king of Israel, to his everlasting credit, does it. He does not just set out a little bread and water, as the prophet said; the book says that he prepared for them a great feast. He sat down, I suppose, with his cooks. He sent for roast meat and loaves and wine. The soldiers of Aram, who had come in the dark to take one man prisoner, sat at the table of their enemy and ate until they were full, and drank, and were thanked for coming. And when they had finished, he sent them away, and they went back to their master.

Now think of what they take home. They do not take home a tale of a battle. They take home a tale of a meal. I can't think of a more disarming report to bring back to a king. "Sire, we were led into the enemy's city, and were at his mercy, and he fed us." And the old book says, in a single sentence, what came of it. "And the bands of Syria came no more into the land of Israel." The raids stopped.

There was a war, and it ended not because someone won it, but because someone refused to do the thing that was expected, and cooked.

Now let us slow down, because the candle is getting low.

There are many things one could say about this story, and I will say only three, and then I will say goodnight.

The first is the borrowed axe. It seems like an odd partner for an army of fire, doesn't it? One is the smallest miracle in the Bible, and the other one is among the grandest sights. But I think they are in the same chapter on purpose. The God who sets chariots of fire on a mountain is the same God who lifts an axe head out of a river for a young man who is worried about what to say to the owner. There is no size of trouble that is too large for Him, and no size that is too small. If He is looking after the armies on the hills, He is looking after you.

The second is the sentence the prophet says to the frightened servant. "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them." Notice that Elisha doesn't say there is nothing to be afraid of. The army is real. The danger is real. What he says is that it is not the whole picture, and that what we are able to see is not all that is there. And his prayer, as I said, is not for the danger to go away, but for the young man's eyes to be opened. Sometimes courage is not a matter of being braver. Sometimes it is a matter of being shown more.

And the third is the feast. Later, Jesus will say to a crowd of people, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you." And Saint Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome, will say, quoting the Book of Proverbs, "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink." Many Christians have heard those words standing right behind this story, in a palace in Samaria, with a long table and a very confused army. That is a reading, and not a thing the book says. But I find that I cannot hear the one without thinking of the other. The bread and the water that Elisha asks for are the very ones that Paul names.

And now, let us go back, one last time, to the roof.

It is still early. The sun has come up over the hills, and the town of Dothan has begun, in its usual way, to wake: a door, and a pail, and somebody's rooster that is a good hour late. The young man who is Elisha's servant is standing at the edge of the flat roof, with one hand on the parapet, quite still.

His eyes have been opened, and he can see them all. The line of fiery horses, on the shoulders of the hills. Their manes like the edge of a flame, not burning the grass. Their chariots, one beside another, in a ring so quiet that he can hear a lark. And the tents of Aram, down below, small and tired and rather sad in the grey.

He is not afraid.

And behind him, down the stairs, he can hear an old man getting up. The scrape of a stool. A cup being filled. A cheerful voice calling up to ask whether the bread has been put out, and has he eaten, because there will be a good deal to do today.

And the boy turns, and he looks once more at the hills, and he is smiling, I think. And he goes down to see about breakfast.

That is all. Nothing else is needed tonight. The hills are full, and the table is laid. And the rest, as the old stories say, is for the morning.

Some notes for the curious. The whole story we have told comes from the second book of Kings, chapter six, verses one to twenty-three, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture. The sons of the prophets, the beams, the borrowed axe, the stick, the floating iron, the king of Aram's plans, the servant's report about the bedchamber, Dothan, the army in the night, the servant's cry, Elisha's answer and prayer, the mountain full of fire, the blindness, the road to Samaria, the opened eyes, the king's question, the bread and water, the feast and the end of the raids are all in the text. The weather, the smell of the wood, the talk by the river, the sounds of the town waking, the thoughts of the servant, and most of the small conversations, are ours.

Three things are worth being careful about. First, the text does not name the king of Israel or the king of Aram, and scholars have not agreed about which kings are meant, so we have not said. Nor does it name the servant. Some readers have wondered whether he is the Gehazi of an earlier chapter, but the book does not say so, and we have left him as he is.

Second, the horses and chariots of fire. The book calls them just that. The reading of them as angels is an old and well-loved tradition, supported by the verse in the Psalms about the angel of the Lord who encamps around those who fear Him, and we have called it a reading.

Third, the blindness. The Hebrew word is a rare one, and many translators think it means a clouding or bewilderment of sight, not total blindness. We have told it that way, and said so.

Elisha is honoured as a prophet by both traditions. We will not give a calendar date we cannot vouch for.

That's the story of Elisha and the chariots of fire for tonight. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you have, tonight, a small worry lifted gently out of deep water and put back into your hand. May your eyes be opened, a little, to how many are on your side. May the dark be smaller than it looked, and the hills fuller than you knew. May you be given the grace to feed the people who frighten you, and may the war end in a dinner. May you have someone who says, do not be afraid, and means it. And may the God who sees you in your bedchamber, and loves you there, keep you and yours, tonight and always.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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