Ezekiel

Scripture: Ezekiel 1-48

Ezekiel is among the first wave of exiles taken to Babylon in 597 BCE, a priest who will never serve in the Temple again. He settles by the Chebar canal with the other deportees. And there, in the fifth year of King Jehoiachin's exile, the heavens open. What follows in Ezekiel 1 is the most overwhelming theophany in Scripture: a storm cloud with fire flashing, four living creatures each with four faces (man, lion, ox, eagle), wheels within wheels with rims full of eyes, the sound of many waters, the sound of the Almighty, a firmament of crystal, and above it all, a throne of sapphire, and upon the throne a figure like a man, surrounded by fire and radiance like a rainbow in the clouds. 'Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of YHWH' (Ezekiel 1:28). Ezekiel falls on his face. The Spirit enters him and stands him on his feet. The commission begins.

YHWH calls him 'son of man', ben adam, a creature of earth, dust, over and over, ninety-three times in this book alone. The title emphasizes both the distance between YHWH and this prophet and the intimacy of the call: YHWH speaks directly and constantly to this particular man of dust. The signs Ezekiel is commanded to perform are severe. He takes a clay brick and draws Jerusalem on it, then builds a miniature siege against it (4:1-3). He lies on his left side for 390 days to bear the iniquity of the house of Israel, then on his right side for 40 more days for Judah, one day for each year of punishment (4:4-6). He is told to bake bread over human dung (he negotiates YHWH down to cow dung). His wife dies and he is commanded not to mourn, to be a sign to the people of the numbness that judgment brings (24:15-24).

In chapters 8-11, YHWH lifts Ezekiel by a lock of his hair (in vision) and carries him to Jerusalem, where he is shown the abominations in the Temple courtyard, idols at the north gate, seventy elders offering incense to crawling things carved on the walls, women weeping for Tammuz, men with their backs to the Temple worshipping the sun (8:5-16). And then the most devastating vision in the book: the glory of YHWH, the same Merkabah from chapter 1, rises from between the cherubim and stops at the threshold of the Temple (10:18), then moves to the eastern gate (10:19), then to the mountain east of the city (11:23), and departs. The glory has left the building. The Temple will now fall because the presence has already gone.

Chapter 37 is the valley of dry bones. YHWH sets Ezekiel in the middle of a valley full of bones, very dry bones, and asks him: 'Can these bones live?' (37:3). Ezekiel prophesies to the bones. Bone comes to bone. Sinew covers them. Flesh covers that. Skin covers that. But there is no breath. Ezekiel prophesies to the wind, the ruach, to come from the four corners of the earth and breathe into these slain. And a vast army stands to its feet. This is the promise of national resurrection for Israel, and underneath it the promise of resurrection that will one day belong to all the dead.

Then, in chapters 40-48, the vision of the restored Temple, vast, geometrically precise, described in exhausting architectural detail over nine chapters. A river flows east from the threshold of the Temple, deepening as it goes, until it runs into the Dead Sea and heals it, and fishermen stand on its banks (47:1-12). And the glory that departed in chapter 11 returns through the eastern gate (43:1-5). 'The LORD is there' (48:35), Adonai Shammah, the final words of Ezekiel, the name of the city in the age to come.

Ezekiel's Merkabah, the chariot-throne, is one of the most theologically potent images in the entire Sanctum framework, representing YHWH's mobile, uncontained glory: He is not localized in a building, not captured by any institution. The valley of dry bones and the river flowing from the Temple floor are the Sanctum's eschatological anchor, the God who departs also returns, and the dead do not stay dead. Ezekiel proves that exile is not abandonment.