A House of Breathless Bones: Ezekiel 37:1-14
Fifth Sunday in Lent
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. 2 He led
me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were
very dry. 3 He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones
live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” 4 Then
he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the
word of the Lord. 5 Thus says the
Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you
shall live. 6 I will lay sinews on you and will
cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in
you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”
7 So I prophesied as I
had been commanded, and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a
rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 I
looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin
had covered them, but there was no breath in them. 9 Then
he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the
breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O
breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” 10 I
prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived
and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
11 Then he said to me,
“Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are
dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ 12 Therefore
prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your
graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you
back to the land of Israel. 13 And you shall know
that I am the Lord when I open your graves and bring you up from your
graves, O my people. 14 I will put my spirit within
you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall
know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”
(NRSVue)
I’ve been
listening lately to Florence and the Machine’s newest album, “Everybody Scream,”
and one song on it, “Perfume and Milk,” has some lyrics that have been rolling
heavily around the edges of this week’s Scripture. “Oh, the hope and the horror, singing
daffodils again / The land, it thaws, and the leaves turn green / And the blue
stars of snow glories with the winter jasmine / Clothes of silk and satin, lace
and leather / The one pink ribbon that holds me together / And all shall be
well / All shall be well / Miracles are often inconvenient / And a prayer is a
spell”.[1]
Happy
spring, officially; happy Lent, still.
Next week is Palm Sunday and Easter lies on the horizon like the first
blush of dawn, but there is so much in between now and then. It feels almost as if the lectionary is also
straining toward the thawing land and the singing daffodils, giving us two
stories of seeming resurrection in Lazarus and Ezekiel. The shroud of Lent is ending! Spring has come again! All shall be well!
That
phrase that Florence and the Machine samples there is taken from Revelations
of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, an English mystic from the 14th
century. It is, perhaps, her most famous
quotation: “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things
shall be well.”[2]
However,
the language right before that is her expression of mourning and sorrow for the
sin in the world, her lament that humans will ever get our act together. Easter is still two weeks away, and on the
other side of the intensity of Holy Week.
There are still nightly frost advisories stalking the daffodils for
another week at least. Lazarus dies
again, at the end of his human life, and Ezekiel’s vision is not quite a
resurrection. We are still very firmly
in Lent, wrestling with the reality that “miracles are often inconvenient” and
these 40 days in the wilderness are wild indeed.
“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.” Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is not
a literal valley of bones, although there are plenty of those in our
world. Ezekiel was a priest-made-prophet
in the 6th century BC whose visions were given him in response to
the Babylonian defeat of the kingdom of Judah and the capture of most of
Judah’s leaders and settled population to crush the spirit of rebellion. This Babylonian Exile is an anchor point in Hebrew
history, a soul-deep ache in the popular conscious. Ezekiel himself was swept up in it, his wife
killed, his position demoted, his people broken.[3] When he is swept into the vision of a valley
of bones, it is not a leap to consider that he feels this stack of mortality
viscerally. When God asks him, “Can
these bones live?” Ezekiel’s answer seems almost dismissive: “O Lord God, you
know.”
I
don’t, we might hear. I don’t
know if we can live again, if there is enough to overcome the frost, the grief,
the loss upon loss. Only You can know,
God of all, if life is even possible. Rev.
Dr. Meda Stamper writes, “While many of us read Ezekiel 37 as a beautiful
passage, it is also horrifying. It is horrifying because it calls the reader to
remember, confront, and testify to the devastating events that led to the
valley filled with dry bones in the first place.”[4]
The
third verse of the Florence and the Machine song goes, “And I am changing,
becoming something else / A creature of longing, tending only to myself / Licking
my wounds, burrowing down / In a house in the woods on the edge of town / Well,
healing is slow, it comes and it goes / A glimpse of the sun, then a flurry of
snow / The first green shoots and a sudden frost / Oh, something's gained when
something's lost.”[5]
“Prophesy
to these bones,” God tells Ezekiel, Ezekiel who has been doing nothing but
prophesying and seeming to get nowhere, Ezekiel who is surrounded by the
stillness of death and sorrow, Ezekiel who might like to stop prophesying,
actually. “Say to them…I will cause
breath 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 breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know
that I am the Lord.”
So
Ezekiel does. Bones reach out to bones,
rattling together, and sinews form to tie them, and muscles cover their
bleached-white nakedness, and skin makes them recognizable, but they are not
alive. Now Ezekiel stands in a valley of
motionless puppets, which is far creepier to me than the bones, and God reminds
Ezekiel, “Prophesy to the breath.”
The
Hebrew for “breath” throughout this passage is the base “ruach,” which also
means “spirit” or “wind,” the very spirit that put Ezekiel in the valley in the
first place. It is the word used when Genesis
describes the Spirit of God moving over the deep waters in the first stirrings
of creation; it is the word used for the wind that blew away the waters
covering the earth to allow Noah and his family to set foot on dry land; it is
the word used for that which gives artisans their creativity and skill when
Moses oversees the decoration of the Tabernacle.[6] The valley of bones will always be a valley
of bones, no matter how un-bone-like they look, until there is breath in them,
Spirit in them, God in them. They are
“changing, becoming something else”—something wholly new, something that shall
be well, because standing on their own is not enough. They need more.
“Mortal,
these bones are the whole house of Israel.”
This passage is not about the resurrection of the body but the
restoration of relationship to God. Professor
Margaret Odell writes, “These are not the ones who were slain but those who
have survived in exile. Parallels with similar expressions in the Psalms
suggest they feel themselves cut off from God’s presence — perhaps because they
perceive the covenant to have been severed, certainly because absence from the
Jerusalem Temple closes off any possibility of seeking God. For the exiles,
being cut off from God means they are as good as dead. If the dry bones represent the living exiles,
then, it turns out that the entire vision is concerned, not with the reality of
death, but with despair.”[7]
Perhaps
a vision of a valley of bones is a stretch for us to imagine, but despair? Oh, that one we know. We are entering week four of a war that does
nothing but create valleys of bones for the greed of men; we are fighting the
co-opting of our Christian faith by nationalistic cruelty; we are struggling
against violence against the marginalized on a staggering scale; we are deep in
the throes of Lent and not just the land but hearts are frozen and it may seem
like nothing shall be well at all. You
have your own awarenesses of the bones surrounding you, and how perhaps some of
them are there by your own hand. Can
they live again? Can anything be
well?
“Miracles
are often inconvenient.” I have sat with
this line for a long time this week, because it’s staggeringly true. “Thus says the Lord God: ‘I am going to open
your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people, and I will bring
you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord when I
open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my
spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil;
then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.’”
But
the Exile lasted 60 years. There were
people who truly died without seeing their homeland, and even when the people of
Judah did return to Jerusalem, the rebuilding process was tremendous. The violence of the Babylonians had not been
fixed in their absence, and the grief scarred the people’s story forever. The
ones who had been left behind in a shadow of their city felt like those
returning weren’t their people at all.
Professor
Odell writes, “Ezekiel’s vision does nothing to
alleviate them of their present difficult circumstances, though it does promise
them a future in their own land.” But,
she continues, while “they remain in exile, still coping with the death of
loved ones, still mourning the loss of familiar ways to find and meet God, they
are reassured of God’s presence.”[8] Rev. Dr. Howard Wallace notes that,
“Resurrection is not
simply concerned with the ‘after life’ but with the raising of broken spirits,
of bodies as good as dead, of hearts that lack strength and courage, of
communities that are fractured, of relationships that have waned or become
fractious, of peoples who have lost hope.”[9]
Miracles are
often inconvenient because they don’t fix everything forever. The people of Israel were not immediately
saved from the Babylonians; Ezekiel did not get everything he’d lost restored; Lazarus
was not given eternal life; we will always have the awareness of the violence
of our nation and the 3,134 people so far killed in Iran,[10] the arrest of 66,463
people by ICE in the first one hundred days of this year,[11] the 2.8 million trans and
nonbinary people in the United States being hounded by a regime bent on
erasure.[12] No restored valley of bones will erase these
realities.
And.
It is Lent,
and Easter is on the horizon, and the days are getting longer and the spring
equinox is past and miracles are decidedly inconvenient and all shall be well,
and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well not because death
and grief and shadow do not happen but because we do not face any of it
alone. “You shall know that I am the
Lord when…I will put my spirit/breath/wind within you, and you shall live.” “The question [this text] answers,” writes
Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson, “is not the familiar, self-interested one,
‘Will I have life after death?’ but rather a more profound and encompassing
one, ‘Will God honor [the] promises to [the] people?’”[13]
“You shall
live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”
You shall have breath, Spirit, a beating heart of hope and defiant faith
that tells you that if things are still violent and cruel, it is not the end
yet; you shall scream for God to fix everything and God will remind you that
everything begins with the first breath; you shall ask for a miracle and it
will be horribly, beautifully inconvenient; you shall pray for resurrection and
will have to die first. We are in the
season of Lent, of penitence and waiting, of change and slow, slow healing. We are journeying toward Easter, footsore and
heartbroken, surrounded by bones.
And we shall
breathe, we the Body of Christ Who lives, Christ resurrected, breathe deep and
know that the Lord is God, now and forever, inconvenient and glorious and living
within us always, ensuring we face nothing, not even the shadow of death,
alone. It is not, perhaps, all that we
want—but we pray with all that is in us that it is enough, for right now, for
this breath, for the next.
May we ask
forgiveness for the despair we carry; may we invite joy with the breath we
take; may we trust, in our very bones, in the God Who claims us and calls us to
the work of restoration. Amen.
[4]
Ibid.
[6]
רוּחַ; Gen. 1:2, Gen. 8:1, and
Exodus 35:31, respectively. See Strong’s
entry Strong's Hebrew:
7307. ר֫וּחַ (ruach) -- spirit, wind, breathzzz
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