When it comes to suffering, I’ve heard Joel 2:25 quoted a lot.
“I will restore to you the years the locusts have eaten.”
Otherwise meant as, Let’s not dwell in the pain. Look for the good. Eventually this will all be rewarded.
But what if it isn’t? What if you live locust-ridden with every breath of oxygen you take on this spinning orb of rock and water?
Where is the hope when the stalks have been stripped bare? When you are rustling with the wind, barren and empty?
If the locusts have feasted and you despair of rain or new growth, what will speak hope to you?
No wonder the prophets of old were so weird. It takes courage to be a voice of hope in exile. It takes a certain method to the madness to imagine a different way of life in the midst of hopelessness.
Maybe this is why Ezekiel needed his iron pan, his chunks of hair. Physical realities that would sustain him when on day 10, day 201, day 389 he wondered if he really was crazy.
Did Ezekiel have someone to visit him? To bake his bread for him? Besides his wife?
What an intensely lonely time that must’ve been.
Is it possible that the only way Ezekiel could see and believe the dry bones filled with life is because he had known what it was to be so empty?
When he was lying on that hard ground, rope divinely tied around him, did he know he was only at the beginning of a 20+ year agonizing adventure?
When the rain soaked his skin and mud became a blanket, did he cling to the vision of sapphire, fire, and rainbow?
“Prophesy, son of man.”
Somehow, 36 chapters and 20ish years of visions and enactments, prophesies and laments, and the unallowable mourning of his wife taught Ezekiel that he could speak, and tendons, flesh, and skin would come to life.
“Prophesy to the breath.”
“Breathe into these slain.”
Brueggemann talks about using the symbols of a community when being prophetic. “Therefore the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history.”
The symbols of the Bible have been used at times to offer a relief that isn’t honest. Don’t worry about your suffering now. God will restore those years. Those dry bones will always come to life. God has a plan. Weeping lasts for a night, but joy comes in the morning.
But some people die in exile.
Sometimes hope feels more like a fleeting vision than the dry ground we find ourselves tied to. Sometimes we find ourselves lying on the ground, simply a pile of bleached bones, and we need those symbols. We need the honesty of grief and the vision of alternatives.
We need to know Someone is standing over us speaking to the wind. Breathing into the slain.
Brueggemann says that even a word can energize us and cause us to believe in a new and different future. I hope that’s true. Because the very end of Ezekiel’s story has a phrase that might just be enough to inspire hope.
THE LORD IS THERE.
This post is a reflection on the book The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann. It’s our#transitlounge book for April. Come linkup your posts!
Yes! Thank you.
Symbols! Yes, I knew I had left something out and thank you for bringing that into focus. I need to think much longer and harder about this; so much is foreign to our concrete communication. I wonder if our very language is part of the royal consciousness; the dominant culture.
Those promises in the Bible, yes, at times can be offered as a dismissal of the raw, real suffering many experience. But they can also be an oasis in the desert of despair, as they carry the overall message of hope. I think especially of the disabled and all I have learned from the prophetic lives many of them lead, perplexed but not crushed by the unrelenting burdens of a lifetime. It is not royal fakery when uttered from the lips of the broken; it is energizing hope.
Thanks for sharing your insights. I’m inspired to read the book of Ezekiel again, as well as all the books of the prophets in the old testament.
This is such a lovely and vivid reflection on Brueggemanns words. It is hard to imagine choosing grief in the vague hope of restoration. We need to find these symbols that lead us to hope and an alternative. I need to find these symbols more. Oh we have so much to learn from these prophets of old.
You had me at your title. We are living in a place that has been in an “exceptional drought” off and on for three or four years now. The having hope is a hard thing in the midst of the dryness, never-ending heat (90 days of over 100 degrees a couple of summers ago). The analogy has been extended greatly living in a drought and feeling the hopeless of anticipating another hot summer. Thank you for helping Ezekial come more alive for me and pushing the idea of hope a bit further for me.
Pingback: God Has A Plan, and Other Useless Advice - Caris Adel