Ezekiel, Jesus and the Spirit of God

Sermon preached at All Hallows by Annie Heppenstall-West on 25 September 2005

I am quite pleased to have the chance to share some thoughts on the Old Testament prophets today. When I first took to Christianity as a young teenager, the Old Testament seemed a dark and disturbing appendage to an otherwise light and loving religion. and I wanted the light and the love, very badly. To me the OT seemed like looking at thick woodland when you are stood outside it, it seems too gloomy to go in, too easy to get lost, better to stay out in the sun, but once you decide to go for it, you find it’s full of life.

I have said myself, maybe twenty years ago, and I’ve heard lots of other Christians say, that they don’t feel the need to go into the Hebrew scriptures because Christ superseded them. In Christ all is new. This week there is an option for a New Testament reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, where he says, ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Jesus Christ.’ Think like Christ.

But to even begin get into Jesus, at some point we have to admit that being Jewish, his sacred texts were the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus’s thinking was shaped, his convictions supported, his fire lit by these writings. In fact I think Jesus saw himself as a successor to the prophets. Take the verses that come after the gospel extract we heard today: ‘no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.’ He is a prophet, and more than a prophet.And to be true to him, Jesus’s followers need to take the message of the prophets to heart.

Skipping the Old Testament is like missing out the bass line in music. It’s got something really deep missing. Having that pointed out to me made me suddenly want to read them, I wanted to find Jesus’s mind in them. When Jesus read Ezekiel, what did he get from it? When I read Ezekiel, what can I pick up about Jesus? and what can I get out of it for myself? There must be something.

Ezekiel is a strange and disturbing book, from a strange and disturbing man, someone called to prophesy at the age of thirty, prone to ecstatic visions, inflammatory remarks and very weird behaviour. Rabbis of old wouldn’t introduce the book to their students until they too had reached thirty years of age, for fear they get the wrong end of the stick. (Notice, by the way, and I’ll come back to Luke later, that Luke is quick to tell us that Jesus was thirty when he began his ministry…)

So where does Ezekiel fit in the big bible story, and what message can he hold for us?

Big picture first.

Going back, we have a group of Hebrews who came from Canaan during a famine, and were granted asylum. Their descendants, however, become enslaved in Egypt, that ancient Mesopotamian superpower. They escape with help of their God of justice and freedom. This is a God like no other, who sides with the oppressed, and who actually demonstrates his power through the liberating of these slaves. This is a God who has proved himself active and effective, a force to be reckoned with, a God of the underclasses, and a subversive and threatening power to wealthy leaders such as the pharaohs.

The slaves live as nomads for decades, led by Moses, a follower of this justice and freedom God. Then they settle in alongside the people of the land of Canaan, who are their relatives. The setup is tribal at first, with city states and local rulers, but in time the people establish a centralised government for reasons of national security. Canaan, now called Israel by the dominant party, becomes an unstable and divided nation ruled by warlords. There is corruption, exploitation and violence, and commitment to the God of the underclasses wanes; the local religion worships the gods and goddesses of agriculture: weather and fertility gods.

Well that’s not so bad, is it, says part of me… nothing wrong with a few nature spirits… except that people were so desperate for good harvests and that the rains wouldn’t fail, that they were prepared to do anything. If the priests told them to sacrifice their own children to appease the gods, that is what they would do. The Canaanite religion was one of fear and belief in pretty nasty magic to get what you wanted. But the God of the Hebrews says ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’

Well as we know this little land of Canaan, now Israel, has big problems, because it is sandwiched between two great nations, Egypt and Babylon. To cut a long story short, Babylon wants Egypt, so it walks through Israel to get it, capturing Jerusalem as it goes. The ‘ somebodys’ of Jerusalem get taken to Babylon, to be made use of and kept out of mischief, and the ‘ nobodys’ get left behind, to work for the Babylonians in making Jerusalem into a kind of TravelLodge for soldiers and business entrepreneurs en route to and from Egypt.

Ezekiel, then, is one of the well-heeled, well-educated political exiles that get taken to Babylon, following the first siege of Jerusalem. Here they stay until the Babylonians get defeated by the Persians, who have a different policy in managing vassal states. Rather than keep the leaders in exile, the Persians send them back with jobs to do. The Hebrews are pleased to go back, but they are now puppets of the Persian empire, and use the nobodys, who never left, in enforced rebuilding programmes. And at this point the God of the oppressed and the exploited speaks again, through a new wave of prophets. But that’s another story.

Ezekiel, then, is one of the Babylonian exiles; all his prophecies take place in Iraq. He is interesting, because although he is of the leading classes, and although he is as a priest, part of the religious establishment, and quite into the official purity rules and so on, he has not forgotten the God of the poor and the oppressed; he is a true prophet of Yahweh. He is a link between voices such as Elijah, who criticised the corrupt king and queenship well before the fall of Jerusalem, and the third Isaiah, who berated the leaders after the exile, for using forced labour and heartless oppression in the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

The passage we heard today sounds at first hearing like the typical aggressive ranting that nice love-centred Christians just don’t want to hear, that big and difficult difference between the religion of the Old Testament and that of the New. A God who gets really angry, death to sinners, life to the righteous… how moralistic, how not us! What kind of guy is this Ezekiel?! What kind of God is this?! Is it our God?

But Ezekiel is speaking the language his listeners need to hear, a language they will understand. Among his audience are the former leaders of Israel. This is what he is criticising them about, what he says God is so angry about:

(Ezekiel 22:6–9, 12, 27–29)

The princes of Israel in you, every one according to his power, have been bent on shedding blood. 7Father and mother are treated with contempt in you; the alien residing within you suffers extortion; the orphan and the widow are wronged in you. 8You have despised my holy things, and profaned my sabbaths. 9In you are those who slander to shed blood… 12In you, they take bribes to shed blood; you take both advance interest and accrued interest, and make gain of your neighbours by extortion; and you have forgotten me, says the Lord….

Their mindset, the language they understand, is violence and self-interest. Ezekiel’s message to the powerful is, You are each accountable and will suffer the consequences of your own departure from God’s way. Don’t blame anyone else for the mess you are in!

and he doesn’t mince his words: Ezek 35:66 Therefore, as I live, says the Lord GOD, I will prepare you for blood, and blood shall pursue you; since you did not hate bloodshed, bloodshed shall pursue you.

Ezekiel has to get through to them, put the fear of God into them, whatever it takes, for the sake of the nobodies back home, that they hope to go back and rule over again. If they return they expect to return to power and prosperity, not the poverty of the brothers and sisters they have left behind, not even equality, they want their status back. They have to come to see that the nobodies are in fact valuable to God, these are the people of the covenant, and that the leaders have a responsibility of care over them. There has to be some change to the status quo, for God to back it. In Ezekiel we hear the beginnings of the Magnificat theme found in Luke’s gospel on the lips of Mary, Jesus’s mother-to-be: he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly… Ezekiel says,

17:24 All the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the LORD have spoken; I will accomplish it.

God is the balancer, the leveller, the one who insists on equality. He is only on the side of the politically powerful when their power is used for the good of the people. This is the God who empowers the lowest of the low, and confounds the mightiest empires of the day, empires which were and are built on slavery, then and now.

And Ezekiel has a vision of how the ones with power should improve their attitude, basically a reversal of what they have been doing – it’s here in the missing chunk from today’s reading:

From Ezekiel 18:5–9 If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right – if he does not … oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment, 8does not take advance or accrued interest, withholds his hand from iniquity, executes true justice between contending parties, 9follows my statutes, and is careful to observe my ordinances, acting faithfully – such a one is righteous; he shall surely live, says the Lord GOD.

This is what it is to be righteous. Not self-righteous, just righteous. And for anyone with any kind of power over another, it is not easy.

Many times through Ezekiel we hear, get a new spirit! God will give you a new spirit!

I will take from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, a new spirit I will give you, and you shall be my people and I will be your God.

Change. Repent! Let God renew you. Begin again, embrace life, embrace what God is about and live. This is what John the Baptist calls the people to do, centuries later, and Jesus after him. Ezekiel says it first.

That heart of stone has to go, it is death. But to live a life according to God’s way, is to have a heart of flesh, it gives life. And to be alive, for Ezekiel and the people of the Old Testament, is to be filled with the breath of God, the spirit of God, wind from heaven, Ruach – remember the story in Ezekiel about the valley of dry bones which God calls Ezekiel to witness and prophesy over. They get put back together to form a huge gathering of the people, they were dead, but God cries prophesy and they are enlivened because God’s breath comes from the four corners of the earth to fill them.

To live is to be spirit-filled, to be enlivened by Ruach, the breath of God; to really live is to live in accordance with the way of God, to oppress no one, to commit no robbery, to give bread to the hungry and clothe the naked, to execute true justice, to be compassionate. This is what it is to live and to have a new spirit. God’s spirit, to Ezekiel, is the living, dynamic principle that drives for freedom, equality and justice for all, she drives for God’s will to be done on earth, the establishing of true peace, shalom.

I have suggested that Ezekiel was – and is – talking mainly to people with some political clout, some influence in society, the intellectuals, the priests, the members of the royal family, skilled, wealthy artisans and merchants. And they resist his word. They see this prophet as entertaining, as eccentric, they laugh off his words and actions as ridiculous, because to take them seriously will require such a big change of heart. Ezekiel has a hard job because his God is the God of the oppressed, the exploited and the abused. He stands like Moses before Pharaoh. The leaders Ezekiel is addressing don’t follow that God; they might say they do by name, but they are idolaters, their gods are about power, accumulating wealth, self-indulgent living. They don’t want to help the poor people, they want to tax them and overwork them so they can build massive temples, palaces, and army barracks. Their god is something else, something destructive.

‘What wicked leaders, how power corrupts!’ We can say, thank goodness we never get mixed up in exploitation and inequalities, thank goodness we are never involved in perpetuating the poverty and degradation of others, thank goodness we are not that powerful… but most of us do have power, and the them-and-us distinction erodes the more closely we look at it. And it’s not about making ourselves powerless to avoid the responsibility. It’s what we do with the power that we have.

People in power sometimes claim to have God on their side, to be acting in the interests of God. They are not, unless they are living in the true Spirit, which compels them, as another prophet, Micah, puts it, todo justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God.

Ezekiel might sometimes sound like he is a prophet of God’s wrath, the old religion that we’ve left behind, but he is, more deeply, a prophet of true justice and God’s peace, and much of what he says is reflected in the gospel accounts of Jesus. When you have time sometime, read Ezekiel and then read Luke’s gospel. I’ve already mentioned the Magnificat, the raising up of the lowly and the bringing down of the powerful. Throughout Luke’s gospel in particular, Jesus is a man filled with the power of the Spirit. As he says at the beginning of his ministry, using a passage from Isaiah,

Luke 4:18–19 ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

Jesus is filled by the Spirit. The Spirit of the Lord is upon Jesus to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God. Living in the Spirit is living by God’s requirements, and Jesus does it, he shows us God.

So what is the message Ezekiel gives us? I can only speak for myself, I think, but

to me, Ezekiel is saying something about my life, the times I’m feeling in control, powerful, and the times I’m not. This ‘getting a new spirit’ thing is a reality that has repercussions on the way I live my life, how I use my power, my resources, my time, my wealth. But also, how I present and perceive my own vulnerability, my weakness, and that of others. When do I act out of self-interest, and when do I try to act in the interests of others?

I have choices every day, every hour, about the way I behave and the priorities I make. Each day I face the same question: is this God, Jesus’s God, and Ezekiel’s God of compassion-driven justice and freedom, really my God, at this moment, and in this situation? I cannot always, with any integrity, say yes, because some days, some times during each day, it will be a different god that attracts me, and I will often give into that god, sometimes without realising, but often quite willingly. I know I fail. I turn to gods that are nothing if not destructive, to myself and others. I fail, and then for a while something brings me back. And sometimes, to some limited extent, I feel that I have said yes and meant it.

There is always a choice whether we will harden our hearts, ridicule the message and turn to false gods, or whether we will change and accept hearts of flesh, which confirm us as God’s people. Hearts of flesh are hearts which can and will be broken open for love. It was a choice presented to the exiles, to the people listening to Jesus in first-century Palestine, and to us now. Not just once, expecting it to last for ever, but every day, every hour, every new situation and encounter.

I mentioned at the start that I used to think I didn’t need the Old Testament because Jesus superseded it. But now I feel that my main inadequacies in trying to follow Jesus are in not paying enough attention to the message of prophets like Ezekiel. Our faith is rooted in the prophetic tradition and makes little sense without it.

I will remove from your body your heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh, and you will be my people, and I will be your God.

Amen.

This page was last updated on Sunday, 25 September 2005

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