Trouble in the Text

Trouble in the Text

In the lore of the Church, we often refer to Ezekiel’s day as the time of Babylonian Captivity.  Babylon had defeated Judah and turned them into a vasal state, but the word “captivity” may be a bit misleading. The strategy was more divide and conquer or conquer then divide. The prevailing assumption was that if you removed the leadership from a community, the rest of the community could easily be subdued. Ezekiel, our narrator, was a member of the upper-class Judean citizens. He was among the initial group carried away during the Babylonian Exile around 597 BCE. Many Jerusalem's citizens were carried away into captivity. Once relocated, the Judeans did gather together in religious communities in Babylon and retained their religious life despite being separated from the Promised Land.

Ezekiel grew up in a divided kingdom, but God gave him a word for the whole house of Israel—both the Northern and Southern nations.  Ezekiel saw the downfall of Judah, but God gave him visions of the whole nation of Israel being restored. His visions came in imaginative stories. Maybe you’ve heard about the vision of the valley of dry bones where God's commanded the bones to rejoin themselves, to take on flesh, and breathe again. Don’t start singing, we’re not there yet.

In Ezekiel 33 and 34, we read Ezekiel's prophetic word against people who have become idolators and oppressors. He interpreted Jerusalem's fall as a sign of God's judgment and that his own call was to warn people that judgment was coming on them like an approaching army in the night. And that they needed to repent and reform.  In Ezekiel 34, a similar judgment is made particularly about the priests--the Shepherds--whom God intended to replace with God's self. This passage encompasses Ezekiel’s call to serve as a watchman. It comes with an ominous word: if Ezekiel sees catastrophe coming and does not warn them, he bears responsibility for the consequences. But if Ezekiel does warn them, and the people do not repent, Ezekiel is innocent of their blood.

Trouble in the World

Immeasurable harm has come from people confusing Ezekiel’s particular call to be an ethical watchman for Israel with a universal call given to all believers to answer anywhere and all the time. Such self-appointed Ezekiels have given us the greatest hits like “I’m just telling it like it is” and “Love the sinner; hate the sin.” They gave us chastity belts, purity culture, and the coffeeshop, table-talk, unsolicited spiritual performance review. These drive-by practices of “accountability” arrive without consent, covenant, or competence.

All this is to say that I hope the takeaway from this text is not that we should feel deputized by the prophet—much less by God—to join an elite morality police force dispatched by land, sea, and social media to issue moral and ethical citations.

Grace in the Text

The undeniable fact about the people of Israel is that they had been defeated—at times, repeatedly defeated. The bullies of Israel’s ancient neighborhood—the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians—worked with the common assumption that deities resided with particular peoples and in particular places. The embedded assumption across the ancient Near East was that the defeat of a people or the conquest of a land signaled the weakness of that people’s god: their god had lost to someone else’s god.

Israel, however, confessed faith in the one God, Creator of heaven and earth. Their defeat, then, could not finally be understood as the weakness of God. It's like, I do not put things on my car that announce I am a Christian: I do not want Jesus blamed for my driving. Ezekiel and others did not want YHWH blamed for Israel’s defeat. The watchman metaphor in Ezekiel was about a whole people doing the difficult work of becoming whole people. It drew a large circle around scattered communities and called them to right-wise social and political arrangements.

For several months, I have returned again to a hermeneutical principle I attribute to James A. Sanders, though I learned it from David Balch: theologize before you moralize. For me, that means beginning with the question, “Who is the God we encounter in this text?” And here I believe we begin with the end in view. We do not finally encounter a God who appoints brash and assertive guardians of everyone else’s soul. We encounter the God who says, “As surely as I live,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live” (Ezekiel 33:11).

The God we encounter in this text does not abandon defeated people. This God is not ashamed of people who have been shamed. This God believes repentance is greater than destruction, perseverance is better than assimilation, and  life is stronger than death.

Grace in the World

I think that is difficult for us to hear. We live in a divisive culture. Much like the strategy of the Babylonians—conquer and divide—the culture tries to divide us.  And just as the Babylonians demanded forced the exiled people to sing their songs for the Babylonians entertainment (Psalm 137), so too, this culture likes to use our faith expressions for their agenda. So, it uses the tools of prophetic witness to attack people rather than protect them. These tools include perception, analysis, discernment, courage--the courage to repent and the courage to call others to repentance.  Yet, these tools given to the prophet become weapons in the hands of prophet-presenting adversaries.

The objective of the faux prophet today is not to draw a fellow believer closer to the light, but to push people closer to the fire. It is to cast another person as the villain and their own constituents as victims, so that they may be seen as victors. Would-be prophets want an audience to see them vanquish evil, even though Matthew 18 teaches that most of the work of accountability within a community is done privately and directly. It calls us to rejoice in the truth and speak the truth in love; to celebrate the restored relationship rather than ridicule the exiled.

In an adversarial and punitive culture, we would not dare reveal our hidden bigotries and biases. We do not name the temptation toward a relationship that exceeds its covenantal bounds. We treat phrases such as “conflict of interest” and “overstepping the appropriate use of power” as accusations rather than as boundaries within covenantal relationship. We fear that the standards of ethical governance will be converted—like plowshares into swords—from guardrails into bludgeons.

We have developed the skills of self-protection necessary to get out of this season of captivity in one piece. But the cost may be the loss of faithful vigilance. The damage done by self-appointed Ezekiels ought not erase the necessity of covenantal ones. Yet that is always the danger. If we were not so guarded against faux prophets, perhaps we could hear Ezekiel’s warning as less a threat to our existence and more as an invitation to live.