The Widow of Zarephath

Foreword

For nearly five years, I’ve offered weekly meditations of between 1,200 to 1,500 words on one or more of the lectionary readings. This week, however, as I studied the Old Testament reading appointed for this Sunday (1 Kings 17:8-16; the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, RCL, Year B), I decided to attempt something different. First, here’s a summary of the reading:

In the midst of a devastating drought, God tells the prophet Elijah something remarkable: “Go to Zarephath, for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” This detail – that God had already spoken to the widow – is often overlooked in the familiar story that follows: At the town gate, Elijah meets a widow gathering sticks for what she believes will be a final meal for herself and her son – they have only a handful of flour and a little oil left. Yet when Elijah asks her to make him bread first, promising that her supplies will not run out until the drought ends, she does as he asks. True to God’s word, her jar of flour and jug of oil remain full throughout the drought.

While studying this text, I was struck by how I’ve tended to overlook a crucial detail in countless previous readings:

I have commanded a widow there to feed you.

This single phrase suggests something remarkable—before Elijah ever arrived at her gate, God had already been in conversation with this unnamed widow. While we typically read this story through the lens of the great prophet Elijah, there’s evidence that God was working simultaneously through one of society’s most vulnerable members. Too often, this story has been misused to demand sacrificial giving from those who have the least, turning a narrative about God’s providence into one about human obligation. But what if we instead heard it through her eyes—not as a tale of demanded sacrifice, but as a story of divine partnership?

What follows is a biblical contemplation, part of a series called “Considerations” that tries to hear the voices often overlooked in our biblical stories—Barabbas, the Samaritan Woman at the well, and now this widow of Zarephath. Through careful questioning, these pieces invite us to consider these encounters afresh, and perhaps to discover that God’s work through the marginalized and overlooked has always been central to the divine story, a truth as relevant today as it was beside the gates of Zarephath.

Considerations: The Widow of Zarephath

Have you wondered about the widow at her gate that day,
Gathering sticks in the dust of endless drought?
Did she recognize the stranger approaching
As the one her God had promised would come?

What stirred in her mind when he asked for water—
A simple thing, until the streams ran dry,
Until every drop became precious as life itself—
Yet she turned to fetch it without a word?

Did she smile, perhaps, when he asked for bread,
Knowing this was the moment God had whispered of,
When her empty jar would meet divine abundance,
When death would bow its head to trust?

What conversations had she held with God
Before the prophet’s dusty feet appeared?
When the Holy One said “Feed him,” did she question
How empty jars could yield such bold commands?

They tell the story as if she merely followed,
As if her faith sprouted sudden as a desert bloom,
But who can say what wisdom she had gathered
In all those days of watching meal and oil fail?

How strange it must have felt to voice her poverty
To one who already knew its bitter taste:
“As the Lord your God lives” — did she pause there,
Knowing He was hers as well, this God of endless jars?

Was there a moment’s hesitation in her hand
When she poured out what could not be replaced,
Or had she learned already what we’re slow to grasp—
That miracles begin with empty vessels freely shared?

Have you considered how the Law speaks tenderly
Of widows who must be fed, protected, clothed,
Yet here’s the Holy One turning tables:
The sheltered one becomes the shelter’s source?

What did her neighbors whisper at the well
When day by day her jar refused to empty—
This widow who should beg but somehow gives,
This empty vessel somehow brimming still?

Did she remember other widows’ stories—
Ruth gleaning mercy in a foreign field,
While she, within her own walls, watched amazed
As heaven’s abundance poured through broken things?

Perhaps she understood before the prophet
What God had always meant about the poor—
That they were never meant to be just vessels
Waiting to be filled, but bearers of God’s gifts?

Strange how God seems drawn to empty places,
To barren wombs and widow’s failing stores,
To shepherd boys and exiled slaves and dancers
Too old to bear the weight of heaven’s dreams.

Did she see herself in Sarah’s ancient laughter,
In Hannah’s tears, in Hagar’s desert cry?
One more unlikely vessel God had chosen
To pour out plenty in a famished land.

What must she have learned of power’s true nature
When prophets came to beg at widow’s doors,
When all of Israel’s might could not make rain fall,
But her small jar kept pouring forth God’s grace?

Perhaps she knew what we keep forgetting—
That God delights in turning worlds upside down,
In finding fullness in the supposedly empty,
And strength in those who’ve lost all strength but trust?

Sometimes I wonder if she ever marveled,
Not at the meal that wouldn’t disappear,
But at the God who chose to work such wonders
Through one already deemed an empty loss.

Did she grow wise to heaven’s upside-down ways,
Each time she reached into those bottomless jars—
How God seeks out the broken and forgotten,
And turns their emptiness to holy ground?

They tell her story as a tale of sacrifice,
Of faith rewarded, of a widow’s mite,
But perhaps she’d tell it as a revolution:
How God taught power to flow from empty hands.

For when the rain at last broke drought’s long silence,
She held a truth as endless as her jar:
That God moves first and most through those called powerless,
And empty vessels carry heaven’s store.