On July 20, the Church keeps the feast of the Holy Prophet Elijah — one of the oldest and best-loved commemorations of the summer calendar. Most of what gets said on this day retells the same three scenes: the drought he pronounces on Ahab, the fire that falls on Mount Carmel, the chariot that carries him off the earth. It’s a good story and worth telling. But it isn’t really why Elijah has stayed so alive, in three different religious traditions, for nearly three thousand years. That has less to do with what he did than with what never happened to him. He never got an ending.

Every other major figure in the Hebrew Bible eventually dies, and the tradition that follows inherits a settled memory — a grave to visit, a legacy to interpret, a life that is, in the plainest sense, finished. Elijah is taken up in a whirlwind. The text refuses him a body, a burial, a last word. Elisha watches him go and is left holding a mantle, not a memory of a death. And because the story never lets him go, neither has anyone else. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have each kept a place for him that assumes he is still, in some sense, on his way somewhere.

It helps to notice that this unfinishedness starts earlier than the whirlwind — it starts at what should have been his triumph. Right after Carmel, at the height of his prophetic career, Elijah runs from Jezebel into the wilderness, sits under a broom tree, and asks God to let him die. Whatever else is happening theologically in that scene, it reads like exhaustion in the clinical sense: no appetite, no energy, sleep instead of coping, and real fear. And God’s response is strikingly unceremonious. No rebuke, no immediate revelation, not even an answer to the request. Just food, then sleep, then food again, and only after that the long walk to Horeb and the famous encounter in the “still small voice” – a King James phrase that flattens a notoriously difficult Hebrew idiom, qol demamah daqqah, sometimes rendered closer to “a sound of thin silence”. Even Elijah’s own defining spiritual moment refuses to resolve into something conclusive. He isn’t cured, corrected, or completed. He’s fed and then addressed very quietly and sent back to work. The pattern that will define how three traditions remember him is already visible here: sustenance instead of closure.

That pattern is easiest to see in Judaism, where Elijah is not so much remembered as awaited. At every Passover seder, a cup of wine is poured and left untouched, and the door is opened, in case this is the year he comes to announce the redemption promised in the last lines of the prophet Malachi — that Elijah will be sent to turn the hearts of parents and children back to one another before the great Day of the Lord arrives. At every circumcision, a chair is set aside and named for him, a custom rooted in an old midrash on his own wilderness complaint that Israel had abandoned its covenant – as if God’s answer to that complaint was to require Elijah’s presence at every renewal of it, forever. When the Talmud can’t settle a legal dispute, it doesn’t call the matter closed; it defers it, quite literally, until Elijah comes to decide it. He is, in Jewish memory, less a figure of the past than an unresolved case still open on the docket.

Christianity inherits the same shape and turns it toward its own horizon. On Mount Tabor, Elijah appears beside Moses, talking with the transfigured Christ – the law and the prophets, both witnesses who never fully vanished from the story, both standing at the edge of the New Testament rather than safely behind it. Orthodox tradition goes further still: it holds that Elijah has not finished his work at all, that he will return before the Second Coming to preach repentance one final time before being put to death by the Antichrist. In 2004, the Ecumenical Patriarchate chose Elijah’s own feast day to canonise Maria Skobtsova and her companions, Orthodox Christians martyred in Nazi camps for hiding Jews – as if it made sense to fold new witnesses against evil into the memory of the oldest one, on the one day already set aside for someone whose story was never allowed to close.

Islam keeps him too, under the name Ilyas, sent – like his biblical counterpart – to call his people away from the worship of Baal back to the oneness of God. But Islamic folk tradition adds something the Bible never quite says outright: it identifies Elijah with al-Khidr, one of four figures Muslim tradition holds to be immortal, still walking the earth, appearing to the faithful in disguise. Scholars of comparative folklore have long noticed that a Jewish legend about Elijah performing three paradoxical acts of hidden mercy for a rabbi named Joshua ben Levi has almost the same shape as the Qur’anic story of Khidr’s paradoxical acts alongside Moses. It’s not clear which story is older or which borrowed from which, but a prophet who was never permitted a grave turns out to be exactly the kind of figure whose story can migrate across a religious border and keep working on the other side.

There’s a final layer of unfinishedness worth naming honestly, because it complicates rather than confirms the picture: even the confrontation that made Elijah famous may not be quite as settled as the text presents it. Some historians who work on ninth-century Israel — most recently Michael Stahl, writing in Biblical Archaeology Review — have argued, on the basis of inscriptions and religious iconography, that the Omride kings the Bible accuses of worshipping Baal instead of Yahweh may actually have promoted Yahweh’s own status by borrowing the storm-god imagery long associated with Baal and that the stark “Yahweh versus Baal” framing may owe more to a later, post-monarchic retelling than to the ninth century itself. This isn’t a consensus view, and readers of that very article pushed back on it hard. But it’s worth sitting with, not because it settles anything, but because it means the “finished”, canonical Elijah we inherit – even the fire on Carmel – is itself the product of people telling and retelling a story whose original edges were less certain than the final version admits.

Maybe that’s the real reason to preach on Elijah rather than just narrate him. A saint with a settled biography can be summarised, admired, and set on a shelf. A prophet without an ending can’t be – he has to be waited for at a seder table, in a chair, at Tabor, in the promise of a return, or in the disguise of a stranger on the road. Three traditions couldn’t agree on almost anything else about him, but they agreed, independently, that his story wasn’t over. That may be the truest thing anyone has ever said about him.