Ezekiel's Hope and Ours

After helping to get this new blogging site off with a couple posts I have been burdened with a number of things and have not posted anything for a couple weeks. One burden has been physical—I came down with a really nasty virus that I am still not completely over and that past onto one of my children. Another burden has been helping my wife transition out of one job and into a new one that she just started this week. It is an exciting change for us but it has been a challenge to pull off in the midst of the holiday season. Finally, there has been the awful burden that we are all feeling of the Massacre of the Innocents in Newtown, CT. The combination of all these things has left my blogging silent. However, during this time I have been reading a brilliant book called Filled with the Spirit, by John Levison.  I wanted to take this blog post to share excerpts from the book’s chapter on the Prophet Ezekiel that have spoken powerfully to me as I have been living with the grief of Newtown.

The Prophet Ezekiel wrote at a time of intense grief and confusion for the people of Israel.  Of his many visions, the one that has had the most intense hold on Jewish and Christian imagination is his vision of God’s restoration of life to a valley of dry bones. Levison’s meditation on this vision is illuminating not only of the biblical text, but also of our own cause for Hope in the midst of death.

Fundamental to this vision is the overpowering reality of death that must be overcome, a horrible reality which Ezekiel captures as he describes the unthinkable. The spirit transports him, of priestly stock, to the land of the dead, to a valley where the bones lie brittle and bleached by the sun and sands of time: “The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry” (37:1-2). It in the echo of this valley of death that Ezekiel gives ear to Israel’s triadic and tragic lament: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” Immediately Ezekiel measures the death around him: very many bones and very dry bones. This is death to the core, to the extent that even Ezekiel—with his fertile imagination…cannot answer “Yes” to God’s question, “Son of adam, can these bones live?” (37:3). Life in such a valley of death is inconceivable even to the boundless imagination of Ezekiel.

And yet, it is in this valley of death that the spirit has deposited him, and it is in this valley, among these very many, very dry bones, that the spirit will accomplish its most astounding act of vivification. In this valley, Ezekiel discovers hope, hope that resides in the presence and the power of the spirit:

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause spirit to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put spirit in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” (37:4-6)

…These bones cannot, therefore, easily return to life. They cannot be raised as they had been, in the throes of sin and the pangs of disloyalty to God. Their dismemberment is due to disloyalty, and they cannot be brought back simply by being layered with sinews, flesh, and skin. (95-96 of Filled with the Spirit.)

The depth of Israel’s sin, and the totality of its death, could only be overcome by a direct infusion of the spirit of life. The magnitude of their fall, and ours, is such that only a deep work of the spirit could possibly bring about new life and hope. This Advent our Hope is what Ezekiel’s was, our Promise the promise given to Israel:

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the spirit: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O spirit, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the spirit came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.” (37:9-10)