At my Latin mass this morning, the priest spoke about John the Baptist. He cited an apparent contradiction within the Gospels. In Malachi 4:5-6, God promises to send Elijah before the great and terrible Day of the Lord, the day of God’s wrath. According to the passage, Elijah will turn the hearts of parents to their children and of children to their parents, so that God will not strike the land with a curse.
The contradiction is this: Jesus identified John the Baptist with Elijah. In passages like Matthew 11:14 and 17:11-13, Jesus explicitly identifies John with the Elijah who is to come. Yet, when John the Baptist is asked if he is Elijah, his response is “I am not” (John 1:25). Both Jesus and John spoke under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, philosopher-priest was saying, so they must both be right. How can we resolve this apparent contradiction?
The priest resolved it by appealing to Luke 1:17, in which the angel Gabriel affirms that John will come “in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (NRSV). According to the priest, John was not Elijah, but rather he came in the spirit and power of Elijah. Elijah himself will come before Christ’s second coming, however. For the priest, Elijah was taken to heaven, so he did not die. And, although the priest did not mention this today, in other sermons he’s referred to Revelation 11:5-6, in which the two witnesses do Elijah-like things, like consuming people with fire (II Kings 1) and shutting up the heavens so that there is no rain (I Kings 17:1). The priest concluded that this means one of the two witnesses will be Elijah. So John the Baptist was not Elijah in a literal sense, and yet he was Elijah, metaphorically-speaking.
The Christian thinker Origen (second-third centuries C.E.) dealt with a similar issue: Was John the Baptist literally Elijah? There were people in his day who argued for reincarnation on the basis of John the Baptist being Elijah. They took the passage in which John denies being Elijah to mean that John had forgotten his previous lives. But Origen comes back at them with the same argument that philosopher-priest used this morning: John came in the spirit and power of Elijah, meaning he was not the actual prophet. In the same way that Elijah gave his spirit to his prophetic successor, Elisha (II Kings 2:15), so John the Baptist had the spirit to do the sort of things that Elijah did. See Reincarnation – A Catholic Viewpoint.
There are things that I wonder about Elijah and John the Baptist:
1. Why did Malachi refer to the prophet Elijah in the first place? Was it because Elijah brought the Israelites to repentance? Or was it because he didn’t believe that Elijah died, so, if a prophet of old were to come back at the end of days, Elijah would be the most likely candidate? Judaism by-and-large maintains that the actual prophet Elijah will come right before the Messiah. That’s why Jews set a place for Elijah at their Passover seders. Armstrongites, however, disagree with the widespread belief that Elijah did not die, for John 3:13 states that no man has ascended unto heaven. For them, God did not take Elijah to the heaven where God is, but he took him to the first heaven, the sky. And he brought Elijah to a safe place, where he lived out his days and eventually died. On one occasion, though, Elijah sent a letter to Jehoram, son of Jehoshophat, the king of Judah (II Chronicles 21:12), perhaps after he’d been removed to heaven!
2. Malachi 4:5-6 says that Elijah will bring the Israelites to repentance, and that he’ll do this so that God won’t strike the land with a curse. Yet, Malachi 4:5 says that Elijah will come before the great and terrible Day of the LORD, which is presumably when God strikes the land with a curse. And so what is going on here? Are these two alternatives: God will spare Israel if she repents, but he’ll send the Day of the Lord if she does not? And God wants to give Israel an opportunity to repent before he sends the great and terrible Day of the Lord?
In Luke 1:17, the angel Gabriel says that John the Baptist will perform this mission of Elijah. John the Baptist brought many people to repentance. Yet, the land still got struck with a curse, for the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Did God strike the land with a curse because John’s success rate wasn’t 100 per cent, or because the “right” people (those in authority) accepted neither John nor Jesus? Or perhaps it was the case that, even though John had a lot of converts, it wasn’t the majority of the Jewish people in Palestine, so the land got struck with a curse.