This Sunday, we’re finishing up with our Lenten exploration of some passages of the Old Testament (next week is already Palm Sunday), and today we have a lesson from the Book of the prophet Ezekiel. Prophecy is a strange word for us, but still not unfamiliar: don’t we hear ever so often about “the prophecies of the end of times“? Yet, we need to know that this is not really the sense the Hebrew Scriptures gave to this literature genre called “Prophecy”. The prophet is a man of God, a holy one, who interprets the signs of the times to the people and explains what’s going on in the world based on what happened in the past. You may remember what we said about that when we talked about the Book of Genesis, we saw how the author(s) of the Book looked at humankind’s past to try to understand what it is that had gone so wrong in Israel. We talked about how this questioning developed during the time of Exile in Babylon, when the Hebrews had lost their king, their city and their Temple. They had it all and they had lost everything, and they wanted to understand why. In the midst of that, the prophet is the man of God denouncing the sins of the people, telling them how they have fallen short of God’s expectations and have caused their own ruin, but the prophet is also the one who, as he calls for repentance, points to a new hope for the future, a hope deep rooted in the assurance of God’s forgiveness, God’s compassion and God’s goodness.
And so this is exactly where we are with Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a prophet of the time of Exile. By birth, he was a priest, but in a foreign land he was a priest without a Temple. He preached on the streets, with words and actions, called the people to mourn their sins but also instilled hope. Now we need to know that Ezekiel is one of the strangest prophets in the Bible and many scholars believe he had some sort of mental illness, given the vividness of his visions and the odd performances he would give to accompany his sermons (I invite you to have a closer look at the Book at home). As for the text we have today, the valley of dry bones, Ezekiel’s most famous vision, it is strikingly as dreadful as it is wonderful and a perfect example of the bridge the prophets made between desolation and redemption.
The first thing we could remark is that The vision of the valley of dry bones may remind us of the Psalm we have talked about last week, Psalm 23, when the psalmist walks with God the good shepherd through the valley of the shadows of death. But far from the romantic ideas we may have developed around the psalm, we’re now in for a reality check. I don’t know if the psalm was inspired by the story of Ezekiel but it is exactly what happens: God takes Ezekiel by the hand and shows him the desolation of the people in a horrific vision, a vision that looks like a nightmare. And indeed, this valley is not your regular cemetery for several reasons:
– God says that the people were slain. They didn’t die a natural, peaceful death. They were an army, the army of Israel, killed by their enemies. They suffered a premature, unjust death in what can only be called a mass murder.
– We clearly see that the bones are exposed, the people haven’t been buried which was a disgrace for the Hebrews and a sign of rejection by God. The people didn’t die a peaceful death but even beyond death they still know no peace.
– Not only the people are dead, but Ezekiel insists that they are “very dead”, they are bones and their bones are dried. Their bodies have decomposed entirely and the bones are mingled. it is impossible to tell one body from another, they are anonymous, they have completely lost their identity and no one could remember them even if they wanted to.
And so I am insisting on those details to underscore that there is a sense of complete hopelessness, this is a vision of utter devastation and desolation. Studying this text reminded me of my visit in Gettysburg, PA a few years ago. I was especially impressed when reading the testimonies from people who lived there at the time as they described how just walking on the battlefield after the battle was over was absolutely traumatic. This was not just death they were looking at, it was the horror brought by sin, violence and war, humanity at its worst. In the vision of Ezekiel there is also this sense of absolute grief we may have today when we watch images of the bombings in Ukraine, school shootings, environmental catastrophes. Godless places, we may call them. And yet. And yet in our text today this is precisely in this place of utter terror, where all hope is gone, it is in those godless places that God walks with the prophet and shows him how God will bring new life to the people. And there are two things I would like us to notice:
– First, we can notice that we encounter a God who re-create in the same way that Godcreated the first time, through word and spirit. This passage is actually often read in parallel with Genesis when the spirit of God is hoovers over the waters and God speaks the words of life. Out of the chaos, God calls everything into existence. God forms humankind from dust, and we see with Ezekiel how God puts back layer upon layer on the dead bodies, bones, sinews, flesh, to call back the slain into life. There is this belief that grows in Israel that the God who created will also recreate, restore, because of God’s justice and God’s forgiveness (We also see that in the Book of Daniel, another prophet in Exile). Sin, violence, war and even death are not the end of the story. God can and will undo the people’s wrongs. This vision is generally understood as an allegory of Israel being able to go back to their land and find again what they felt at the time was lost for ever: their city, their king, their Temple. For later Jews and for us Christians this is also, of course, a story of Resurrection. We can interpret the valley of the dry bones not only as an image of the exiled and suffering Israel, but beyond that, as the terrible reality of our world. And yet the prophet shows us that even when everything is lost, everything can be born again because it all rests on God’s goodness and God’s mercy.
– And this is the second thing I would like us to notice, it’s the humble trust of Ezekiel in God’s goodness and God’s mercy. When God asks Ezekiel: “Mortal, can these bones live?“, this could be what we would call a loaded question. How could a mortal see bones coming back to life, especially given the utter state of desolation they’re in? And yet, Ezekiel trusts that God knows what God can do. He says: “O Lord God, you know“. Even when faced with the impossible, there is this trust that God is even bigger. Notice that it is not blind trust, neither arrogant faith nor naive optimism. Ezekiel does not dismiss the question, saying that God can do whatever. Ezekiel takes in all the horror and still trusts that God can make a way. To me, this is really what this text is about in the end and what we are called to imitate: To take as seriously as possible the reality of sin, suffering and death and yet to humbly trust that God can reverse the dynamics of violence and destruction, to trust that God can and will bring new life as God first gave life to this world, even if it impossible for us to understand how. This is actually the whole story of the Bible. The Bible tells us the story of a people who have lost their true land and their home and look for a way back and God will bring them back. In the end, it’s not the vision of death in Ezekiel that is an image of the Exile, rather it’s the actual Exile of the Hebrews that will become an image of our Exile on earth, and Israel’s return to the promise land an allegory of our resurrection.
And so, this is of course the mystery we are invited to enter in as we approach Easter: How do we understand Resurrection and our true home in heavens? How do we trust God with leading us into new life? We continue to learn in meditating on the suffering, death and Resurrection of Jesus and how Jesus shows us that the Kingdom of God is not a fantasy land where everything is okay and fun, but the Kingdom of God is the place where people are freed from their sin so they can live according to God’s rule, indeed as was first intended in the garden of Eden, the place where they have belonged from the beginning.