Advent 4
Who’s in the Pub?
Elah the Drunk (cf 1 Kings 16:8-10)
I sit quietly in my usual spot at the darkened corner of the inn. I’m comfortable here, and the locals know me simply as Elah, although they also call me the village idiot and the town drunk. I would be the first to own up and say that I am all three. You’d have to be an idiot to be a drunk.
But I have seen too much, and the wine seems to be the only thing that numbs the pain… until the next morning.
But it wasn’t always this way. I vividly remember the verve with which I went to war against the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” My job was to loot all the corpses. That was it. How hard can it be, and what could possibly go wrong? It’s not as though they can jump up and cut your head off.
Most of them were mutilated and decapitated with their eyes still open, gazing accusingly up at you and their mouths twisted in the agony of their death. Take the swords, the purses and the shields. It’s easy… or is it? For you just can’t forget those sorts of things. I still see every one of them when I close my eyes at night.
Eventually, my tour of duty ended, and when I returned from the battlefield, sleep became elusive, my dreams became more vivid, the fuse on my temper became shorter, and my anger became more intense. After all the thrashing nightmares, Elkanah, my wife, left me to become a temple prostitute.
So, for medication and company, I find myself here at the inn. There was, after all, no one left at home, and it became easier to eat bar meals than to go to the market, buy the produce and try to toss something together by myself, for myself.
My indifference and sloth spiralled downward into a maudlin self-pity. I am complacent about the injustices I hear at the bar. My heart is hardened to my fellow compatriots, who, like me, have traded one kind of savagery for another. The death they inflict is no longer towards the enemy army, but rather a slo,w torturous death upon themselves and those who are closest to them. The wives, the friends, the children, the brothers and sisters. There are no winners except, of course, the Romans who tax the wine I drink and the publican who makes a killing from my misery.
Every so often, I sense that this is not all there is. Other people are leading happier lives, different lives, and just for once I would like not be labelled as old Elah, the town drunk and the village idiot, or is it the town idiot and village drunk? I am more than that … surely… aren’t I? It is not who I am.
What would it take to break free from the wine and the solitude? How do you do that? Who could help me, and what would they be like?
I need to be surprised, disquieted, shocked and shaken. While my wine goblet is never dry, I have never been emptier. Whilst my belly is stuffed full and gorged with lamb, olives and bread, I am famished for a fresh new beginning.
And not just me, but everyone who drinks with me, whinges with me, ignores me and belittles me. Our world is tired, and it is time for something quite radical, quite different, something quite surprising. I know this is what is needed, but I cannot do it by myself. I am allowing this to ruminate in my sozzled mind when all of sa udden there is a loud, urgent knock on the door and there stands a rough-hewn, grubby carpenter with a teenage girl in labour.
“Jesus Master carpenter, when you knock upon the woodenness of our indifference and sloth, give us the will to open the door and greet your arrival with joy. Grant us the strength to open our souls, our lives and our hearts to you. Step across the threshold of our complacency and lodge within us. Weep, dance and laugh with us. Make us uncomfortable, surprise us, disturb us, disquiet us and challenge us. Replenish us when our cup has run dry and when we are famished, nourish us with the bread of life. And finally, when our earthly temple collapses in death, bring us to the home you have prepared for us, where your eternal banquet goes on forever and ever, Amen.”