The Cloak at the River
When the person whose faith carried you is no longer standing beside you, whose God do you call on at the edge of the river?
“He also took up Elijah’s mantle that fell from him, and went back, and stood by the bank of the Jordan. He took Elijah’s mantle that fell from him, and struck the waters, and said, ‘Where is Yahweh, the God of Elijah?’ When he also had struck the waters, they were divided apart, and Elisha went over.”2 Kings 2:13-14
The story begins years earlier in a plowed field. Elijah walked past Elisha, who was working behind twelve yoke of oxen, and threw his cloak over him (1 Kings 19:19). That was the call. Elisha left the oxen, said goodbye to his family, and followed. The cloak, or mantle, was the prophet's outer garment, the same garment Elijah wrapped around his face at the mouth of the cave on Mount Horeb when God spoke in a low whisper. It was ordinary cloth, and it went everywhere Elijah went. Now, near Jericho, Elijah rolls it up, strikes the Jordan, and the two men cross on dry ground. Elisha asks for a double portion of his master's spirit, the share a firstborn son would inherit (Deuteronomy 21:17). Then a chariot of fire separates them, a whirlwind takes Elijah up, and Elisha is suddenly alone. He tears his own clothes in two. Then he bends down and picks up the cloak that fell.
Notice where he goes next. He walks back to the same bank of the same river, the place where Israel once crossed into the land under Joshua. He has the cloak in his hands, but he does not say, "Where is Elijah?" He asks, "Where is Yahweh, the God of Elijah?" The cloak never held the power. It was a reminder that God had been faithful to one man, and a question about whether he would be faithful to the next. The water parts. The answer is not that Elisha has become Elijah. The answer is that Elijah's God is still at the river. Scripture has a word for that kind of faithfulness passed down the generations. God says he shows hesed, his loyal, covenant loving kindness, "to thousands of those who love me" (Exodus 20:6). His steadfast love does not retire when his servants do. It keeps its promises from one life to the next.
Many of us carry someone else's cloak. A grandmother's worn Bible with notes in the margins. The memory of a father praying at the kitchen table. A pastor who walked us through our worst year and then moved away, or died. We loved their faith, and for a long time we leaned on it. Then one day we find ourselves standing at our own Jordan, holding what they left us, and the water is still there. Our culture tends to treat faith as either inherited tradition or private invention. Elisha's question cuts between the two. He honors what was handed to him, and he still has to ask, out loud and for himself, whether the God of Elijah will meet him here. That is a lonely, honest question. It may also be the moment borrowed faith begins to become your own.
Whose faith has carried you, and what did they leave in your hands? Write about a river you are standing beside right now, and what it would mean to ask, "Where is the God of the one who went before me?"
Lord, thank you for the people whose faith showed me the way, and for the things they left behind that still point me to you. I confess that sometimes I have leaned on their trust more than I have trusted you myself. Meet me at my own river, as you met Elisha at the Jordan. Let your steadfast love that kept them keep me too, and carry it on to the ones who come after me. Amen.