It is a dark time for our beloved country. Polls show that our president suffers from sinking approval ratings. His enemies speak brazenly of wanting to impeach him.
President Donald Trump must have hoped that his first trip abroad would afford some relief, but partly owing to his own unconquerable desire to tweet his enemies into submission, his political troubles follow him on his important foreign travels.
But in the midst of this disheartening scenario, he met with Pope Francis, and behold, there dawned a ray of hope. They met privately for 30 minutes Wednesday. When they emerged, the president was overheard saying to the pope, “I will not forget what you have said to me.”
What a moment! It reminded me of the Transfiguration (reported in Matthew 17), when in a vision Jesus is seen talking with Moses and Elijah. What could these men have been talking about?
In the case of the meeting at the Vatican, it is not hard to imagine. From the first days of his papacy, by word and example, Francis has directed attention to the plight of the poor as the touchstone of ethical action. We saw it in his first great encyclical, “Laudato si,” where he tied the imperative of taking action to curb climate change to its impact especially on the poor. Rising sea levels, he says, will trap and imperil those who cannot easily move to higher ground.
Francis also cites the Last Judgment (Matthew 25), where the king of heaven gathers “all the nations” before him and separates them into two groups. On the right he puts those who “saw me hungry and gave me food, or sick and visited me, or in prison and came to me.” But when, they ask, did we do these things? Inasmuch as you have done it to the least my brethren, he says, you have done it to me. As for those on his left, you have ignored the needs of the poor and miserable. To them he says, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
In a 30-minute audience, the pope would not have delivered a harangue to a man with limited patience, but he would not have missed the opportunity to share the central message of his papacy.
What calls Elijah to mind (apart from the performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s glorious oratorio, “Elijah,” last Saturday at the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst) is that his prophetic career seems so pertinent to the crisis we Americans are experiencing.
Our president has been in the Middle East this week fishing in those same troubled waters. He comes off looking like one of the kings of ancient Israel jockeying for advantage and survival among the powers of the region.
Like Jereboam and Ahab, Trump seeks to remake the structure of our alliances. Hail to the Sunnis (Saudi Arabia)! Away with the Shiites (Iran)! Murderous enemies surrounded ancient Israel. In the midst of these dangers, Israel also had to cope with drought and deadly famine. (The story is told in I Kings 17-19.)
King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, desperate to bring relief to their people, call on the priests of Baal. Elijah thunders against this tactic. Jehovah, he warns, is a jealous God. Ahab tells Elijah to stop troubling Israel. It is not I who am troubling Israel, says the prophet. Your worship of false gods will ruin us.
The drama reaches a tremendous climax when Elijah challenges the priests of Baal to call upon their manifold deities to bring rain. Their efforts, despite repeated attempts, fail. Then Elijah, standing alone against the king and his priestly court, pleads with the Lord to demonstrate his power. The Lord responds, not with crashing thunder and bolts of lightning, but in a still, small voice.
Elijah then asks a small boy whether he can see any clouds. Several times the boy answers that he sees no such thing. But finally he sees a cloud, no larger than a man’s hand, on the horizon. Pretty soon the heavens break loose and flood the thirsty land. The drought is broken. The land comes to life.
Trump was not the only American president abroad this week. Barack Obama has been in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel, helping to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Protestant Reformation. Their theme was to stress the relationship between democracy and spirituality. Luther in 1517 insisted on the priesthood of all believers. To equip the laity for ministry, he himself translated the Bible from classic Latin into the vernacular (German language). The Reformation gave believers in Christ a collective imperative: to engage together in the work of citizenship.
The U.S. Constitution, in its First Amendment, protects the “free exercise of religion.” Let us pray for a miracle of rebirth, not just for President Trump, but for all of us.
Don Robinson, a retired professor of government at Smith College in Northampton, writes a regular column published the fourth Thursday of the month. He can be reached at drobinso@smith.edu.