The Life and Mission of Elias the Prophet
Rev. Charles B. Garside, M.A.
Mount Carmel is within view of the town of Nazareth in Galilee, where, in the holy house of Mary, the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us. Somewhere along its rugged peak, six hundred years before the birth of Christ, lived the great prophet Elias the Thesbite and his celebate school of disciples. He enters the pages of sacred hsitory at the start of the 17th chapter of the third Book of Kings without introduction, abruptly, like a bolt of lightning, standing before Achab, the impious king of Israel, "like a fire," to which he is so aptly compared in chapter 48 of Eccleasticus. Even the legend of his birth, recounted by Saint Epiphanius in his Lives of the Prophets, has the father of the man of God, in a vision, beholding his son being fed not by his mother's milk but by fire. He appears before the apostate king of the 10 tribes to accuse him of rebellion against his Creator through his sins of impiety, idolatry, and lust, while threatening the ruler and his kingdom with the Divine Vengeance that was to come by means of a three year drought.
One cannot help but notice the similarity of Elias (whose name means "strong God") with John the Baptist, the greatest of all the prophets. John, too, rebuked a king who had transgressed the moral law by his incestuous adultery. The Baptist was martyred, Elias sorely persecuted. The Savior Himself refers to his precurser as another Elias. This is the story of the man whose name is practically synonymous with the word prophet. This is the portrait of a thundering visionary who lights up the Old Testament. A man of prayer and solitude, celebate and chaste, he moved courageously with every heavenly summons, never failing, never daunted.
Loreto Publications, 1924, Soft cover, 218 pgs |
