Reading Ezekiel for God's Mission
I do not like airports. Wendell Berry gets at my sense of unease when he writes, "For me, air travel always has about it an insistent feeling of unreality. I feel that I am where I do not belong, with a totally arbitrary assemblage of other people who do not belong there either." I'm not where I'm from and not yet where I'm going. This feeling of confusion and discombobulation is a big part of finding ourselves and God's mission in the book of Ezekiel.
Nobody's home when they're at the airport. Every single person is in the middle of their trip. They're "in-between." Sometimes life drops us in a "messy middle"—that place where we're not where we started, but we're nowhere near the destination yet. This is a liminal space–the space between. In a tragic and dramatic sense, this is what the book of Ezekiel is all about.
Ezekiel offers up to us a vision of what it can look like to meet God in our "messy middle." God cares about our liminal spaces. We may not find ourselves in exile in quite the same way as Ezekiel and Israel, but we certainly can relate to feeling that the world is not the way it's supposed to be.
The story of God in Ezekiel
Our story is the story of the Church. The story of the Church is the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus is the story of Israel. And the story of Israel is the story of God, who made the world and who is putting the world back together again. Ezekiel comes to us from the midst of the story of Israel.
We can think of this story of Israel in five big movements: Abraham, Moses, David, the Exile, and the Return. In Ezekiel, we find ourselves at the very beginning of the Exile, events we find in 2 Kings 24 and 25. Ezekiel would have been among the very first of those taken from Judah to Babylon prior to the destruction of the city.
"Beside the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept as we thought of Jerusalem." Psalm 137 provides us with some of the emotional weight that runs in the background throughout Ezekiel. It's heavy stuff. This a time of extraordinary political, social, and religious upheaval for Israel. The "old way" of doing things is slipping rapidly away, and the people's sense that God is with them is fading just as fast.
The number five figures prominently in the organization of the Old Testament. There are five "Books of Moses." There are five "books" within Psalms. And there are five books of the prophets. These are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Twelve (often called the "minor prophets"). The book of Ezekiel shares much in common with the other prophetic works in terms of the historic, political setting.
The story of the Church in Ezekiel
You might be asking yourself, "Where is Jesus in Ezekiel? Where is the Gospel in Ezekiel?" And those are excellent questions. Curiously, the book of Revelation provides the most significant place of interaction of the New Testament with Ezekiel. In fact, you really shouldn't get too deep into Revelation without getting soaked in the images, words, and movements we find in Ezekiel.
Chapters 40 to 48 concerning Ezekiel's vision of a new temple and a new Jerusalem, especially, provide a language world for Revelation. There's a divine guide for the vision who measures the city. There's a river flowing out of the temple. This river has life-giving properties. There are trees along the river that provide healing. There are new boundaries for the tribes of Israel. God's rule is associated with God's redemption of the people.
Like Revelation, the book of Ezekiel is for a group of people with legitimate reasons to despair. The sovereignty of God has the final word, not the geopolitical statecraft that Israel finds itself a victim of. As John Lennon once said, "Everything will be okay in the end. If it's okay, it's not the end." This is one of the big themes of Ezekiel. When the world turns upside-down, it's still God who has the final word.
Ezekiel and contemplative spirituality
Ezekiel is a book about finding God in the most unexpected places. In the 14th century, an unnamed mystic wrote the contemplative classic The Cloud of Unknowing. In chapter 3, the author writes, "Lift your heart up to the Lord with a gentle stirring of love desiring him for his own sake and not for his gifts... In the beginning, it is usual to feel nothing but a kind of darkness about your mind, or as it were, a cloud of unknowing... Learn to be at home in this darkness. Return to it as often as you can, eating your spirit cry out to him whom you love."
Ezekiel belongs to the Christian tradition of mystics like this. As we open to chapter 1, we find the prophet on the banks of the River Kebar in Babylon among the Jewish refugees following the first siege (out of three) of Jerusalem. We're among a community displaced from their homes. In the ancient world, the gods were associated with the geography of their nation. Babylon is slowly crushing Judah. Therefore, it follows that the pantheon of Babylonian gods has triumphed over Yahweh of Judah.
But then God shows up.
God is not supposed to be here. God would not stoop to the level of stepping foot on pagan soil. And yet, God does. In a foreign land, among foreign people, Ezekiel experiences an extraordinary vision of God. This is where God shows up. In the middle of the anxiety, lament, grief, and loss that Ezekiel and his people know, God comes to be present. This is a profound lesson for us today as we tend to our inner lives. We may find ourselves surprised by the seemingly ordinary places God shows up.
Ezekiel and God's mission
Beginnings and endings are really important when we're trying to make sense within individual books of the Bible. We start at a river, an ordinary river in a pagan land. We end with the vision of a river. This is a holy river whose source is the very presence of God in the temple.
But what's amazing about this river is not just its source, but what happens all along its banks.
"Fruit trees of all kinds will grow along both sides of the river. The leaves of these trees will never turn brown and fall, and there will always be fruit on their branches. There will be a new crop every month, for they are watered by the river flowing from the Temple. The fruit will be for food and the leaves for healing."
Healing. It's a profound word that anchors every vision within the book of Ezekiel, and a lot of them are difficult in a modern Western world. But when we keep this vision of God's healing river front-and-center in our reading of Ezekiel, we don't forget God's big dream for the world. The promise to Abraham of blessing and blessing to the whole world is captured in this picture.
And if that weren't enough, the very final statement in the book ties together one of the biggest themes through the whole Bible: "And from that day the name of the city will be 'YHWH Is There.'" It's the hope of God in Exodus and in the story of Jesus. God is with us. This is God’s mission—to be home. This is the work of our outer lives.
The book of Ezekiel is one significant place in Scripture that funds our imagination about what God has done, is doing, and will continue to do in our liminal spaces. From what we read in Ezekiel, we know that when we find ourselves in a "messy middle," God is right there present with us.