Ezekiel never has been our favorite prophet, has he? We much prefer Isaiah, especially the words we can copy straight to our Christmas cards. We also like Amos and Micah, who speak out with such passion and courage for justice for the poor. But Ezekiel? He doesn’t show up much in our Sunday school lessons or in our lectionary; he does get quoted, though, sort-of, several times by Samuel Jackson’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.[1] Ezekiel is strange; some would say, he’s weird. His visions and voice are imaginative, often incomprehensible, with violent and pornographic tendencies, and his most fervent readers tend to be of the wild-eyed kind.
Ezekiel, son of Buzi, was a Judean priest, or perhaps a recent graduate preparing for the priesthood. He was part of a first wave of exiles from Jerusalem whom King Nebuchadrezzar deported to Babylon in an attempt to subdue the troublesome leadership of Judah. We don’t know much about Ezekiel’s personal life, but I imagine that as a priest he felt utterly out of place in that foreign land. You can be a teacher without a school building; you just gather your students in the living room or under the tree in the back yard. You can be a bricklayer or a weaver anywhere in the world, as long as you have your tools. But Ezekiel was a priest of the Lord whose temple was in Jerusalem, and outside of that sacred place he was a man without a purpose. His entire community had been uprooted, and they all struggled to make sense of this devastating experience.
It was in exile that Ezekiel became a prophet of the Lord. He had visions, he heard voices, in the grip of God’s spirit he traveled far, and he shared what was revealed to him with his compatriots. Ezekiel insisted that their exile did not reflect the defeat of their God by the gods of Babylon, as some surmised; no, their loss was the judgment brought down on them by the Lord, and in Ezekiel’s mind, it was altogether justified and deserved. In his reflections, there was no room for historical or geo-strategic analysis that might explain Jerusalem’s defeat as collateral damage in the conflict between the global powers of the day, Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt. In Ezekiel’s mind, it was all God’s doing, and the God he knew was consumed by wrath and bent on violence. The fire burning in Ezekiel’s belly was one few if any of his fellow exiles had ever even gotten close to. And the bad news continued to pile up, layer upon layer of loss and grief.
The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes, yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down. Groan quietly; make no mourning for the dead. Bind on your turban, and put your sandals on your feet; do not cover your upper lip or eat the bread of mourners. So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded.[2]
Ezekiel declared that the Babylonians would breach the walls of Jerusalem, burn the buildings to the ground, slaughter many of the inhabitants, and deport the rest. And those who thought that Ezekiel was out of his mind weren’t so sure anymore when more news arrived from Jerusalem. “In the twelfth year of our exile, in the tenth month, on the fifth day of the month,” he wrote in his diary, “someone who had escaped from Jerusalem came to me and said, ‘The city has fallen.’”[3]
Everything that once made them who they were as a people, had been taken away or destroyed: the land, the temple, the city and throne of David, their proud theology of the city that shall not be moved.[4] All gone. All they had left was their exhaustion and despair.In the midst of that, Ezekiel heard a new word—or was it the memory of one he had heard long ago?
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.[5]
He heard this word, or half-remembered it, but who among his people could hear it? Was he ready to say it? He wrote it down, but he couldn’t say it. The words of judgment had come to him more easily. And the losses they had experienced were much more tangible than these first whispers of hope that were seeking a way to his lips, whispers of a new heart and a new spirit.
Then the hand of the Lord once again came upon Ezekiel, and the Lord brought him out by the spirit of the Lord and set him down in the middle of a valley. It was a journey into the heart of the people in exile, a journey into the depth of his own heart. Ezekiel didn’t just see a valley full of bones, he walked around in it. The Lord led him around as if to make sure he would take in the full extent of life’s absence.
Ezekiel was a meticulous diarist, noting, e.g., that the word of the Lord came to him in the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth day or in the seventh year, in the fifth month, on the tenth day.[6] But Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, unlike his other visions, does not bear a date, as Elie Wiesel noted. Why not? Wiesel suggested, because every generation needs to hear in its own time that these bones can live.Because in every generation, those who have reached the end of the miserable road that took them away from home, away from joy and life and hope—they need to hear in their own time that these bones can live. All of us in the valley of history hear some echo of the Lord’s question, “Mortal, can these bones live?” And all of us need to hear some echo of Ezekiel’s words, spoken with fantastic courage or holy madness, “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. … You shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” Ezekiel was about as far away from the garden of creation as the human imagination can go, and there, in the dust where life once was, in the desert of tired despair, he spoke the word of the Lord.
And a rustling sound / as of leaves in autumn wind / started amid the dry bones. / A whisper, then a drumbeat! / They stood erect, those bones, and knitted firm! [7]
One human being, walking like the last chronicler through fields of destruction, Ezekiel spoke the words of God,
and the spirit entered the bones. / First a whisper, / then a drumbeat, / then reverberant – / a heartbeat! / They took breath once more! and / walked about! and / conversed one with another! / joyful, harmonious, / an immense throng, / the newborn, / the living![8]
The prophet spoke, and hope began to sing: Death no dominion! “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live!”
It was God who made humans from dust and breathed into them the breath of life.[9] It was God who brought Israel out of Egypt, making covenant with them at Sinai, and bringing them to a good land. And now, Ezekiel saw and declared, God would bring new life to a weary people whose bones were dried up and whose hope was lost. The spirit of God is blowing in the valley, he told any who would listen—let it breathe on you, let it breathe in you; allow it to give breath to your voice and inspire your actions. You are not cut off from the presence of God—breathe, the spirit of God is as close to you as your own breath. Breathe—this is not the end of the road.
In the Gospel of John, the reality of death is stated less poetically by Martha who says it as it is: “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Then Jesus speaks, and Lazarus emerges from the tomb. Jesus speaks the word that gives life to the dead,[10] and it begins to dawn on Martha, and on us, that Jesus is the word that gives life to the dead. In Jesus we meet the human being who embodies the life-giving word of God so fully, that the Gospel of John declares him to be the word of God—not merely a great teacher of the word, or a prophet who faithfully proclaims the word, but the very word of God living life with us as a human being.
We know the place where we say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.” We know the place where despair presents itself as the only reasonable response to the course of the world. We know the place, and anytime we get there, it’s good to have a friend like Ezekiel who’s been there and returned with a vision of God’s insurrection against hopelessness. We know the place where nothing seems more real than death, and when we’re there, may we know in our bones that Jesus is there with us, breathing and speaking life—the life that ends death’s dominion.
[1] “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/characters/nm0000168 Cf. Ezekiel 25:17 “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful punishments. Then they shall know that I am the Lord, when I lay my vengeance on them.”
[2] Ezekiel 24:15-18
[3] Ezekiel 33:21
[4] Psalm 46:5
[5] Ezekiel 36:26-28
[6] Ezekiel 8:1; 20:1
[7] Daniel Berrigan, Ezekiel: Vision in the dust (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997), 114.
[8] Berrigan, 115.
[9] Genesis 2:7
[10] cf. Rom 4:17