When she reached the man of God at the mountain, she took hold of his feet. Gehazi came over to push her away, but the man of God said, “Leave her alone! She is in bitter distress, but the LORD has hidden it from me and has not told me why.” – 2 Kings 4:27

Today’s Scripture Reading (December 10, 2019): 2 Kings 4

I love to read the original answers given by children on their school tests when they don’t know the answer to the question being asked. Like maybe the child that wrote “Jesus” as the answer for all of the questions he didn’t know because “Jesus is always the answer.” The teacher might not have been impressed, but the attempt at least amused me.

“I don’t know.” The words are hard, basically because all through our lives, it seems that we are expected to know. Throughout our schooling, we are asked questions on exams of things for which we are supposed to have an answer. And the higher the grade, the more that is expected of us. When I was in graduate school, to get an A on an exam or a project meant that you knew 94% or greater of the given material. It didn’t happen in my family, but I have friends who, when they sat down for family dinner, were expected to know and contribute to whatever the discussion was that was taking place around the table. When we get a job, we are supposed to know. A couple of decades ago, as a younger pastor, I remember a discussion with a parishioner about a church problem, and I admitted that “I didn’t know the answer.” The reply that I received was “you should. That’s why we pay you.” The simple words “I don’t know” often seem to invite ridicule.

And yet, sometimes, we don’t know. So maybe it feels good to hear the same response coming from Elisha in the words “the Lord has hidden it from me.” “I don’t know.” Elisha actually seems to be surprised, not that he “hears the voice of God,” but rather that, in this instance, God has not spoken to him.

But there is also a reason why sometimes “we don’t know.” I had some colleagues who used to call me “the Bible Answerman” (trust me, I am not) because I seemed to know where to look for specific passages in the Bible. But that is not God’s purpose for any of us. We are members of community, and while we may know certain things, the answers to the hard questions should arise out of the common knowledge that we all share. Maybe this is the one thing our school training missed, that some of our exams, perhaps the most significant ones, should have been a shared problem on which we could all have input. The Answerman should never be one person; it should be the community, all of whom are gifted differently by God. Elisha didn’t know, but with the help of the Shunammite woman and her servant, Gehazi, he could find out what it was that God had hidden from him. And together, they could solve the problem.   

The nineteenth-century Scottish Baptist Minister Alexander McLaren makes this comment on this passage. “How much better would it have been for the Church if its teachers had been more willing to copy his modesty, and said about a great many things, ‘The Lord hath hid it from me’!” Sometimes we genuinely don’t know. Like Elisha, the Lord has hidden it from us. (And in those moments, our only answer truly is Jesus and the community that has brought around us.) 

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2 Kings 5