Bible Study

Tuesday

8th July 2003

Hope: Exile, Resurrection & the Discipline of Discernment

Readings:

Ezekiel 37: 1-14.
John 19: 25-27.

Yesterday’s Bible Study left us poised on the edge of hope and expectation. We saw then how Ezekiel 36 finds God resolved to act ultimately for God’s own sake and reputation. It seems that at this point God reaches behind all the familiar promptings that usually motivate action on Israel’s behalf. At this point God digs down beneath God’s reservoirs of faithfulness, and loyalty to the Covenant, and compassion – and finds an even deeper impulse to intervene. God acts for God’s own sake.

Now as we peer forward in anticipation, we see before us the figure of the prophet Ezekiel in a dry and deathly place: the valley of the bones.

Here we move beyond the thirsty dryness of Psalm 42, where the writer pines for God’s presence in a season of absence;

Here we move beyond the barrenness of Abraham and Sarah, who are surprised by birth in their time of infertility;

Here today we are taken into an even more desperate place.

Here we stray into the forbidden realm of death and defilement, a profane valley from which all last traces of life have long since gone, and only dust is left, and dry, dry bone. It’s a scene that brings to mind images of the killing fields of Iraq, where life and hope are mocked by death, decay and bone.

Here there is no water, no deep with its surging, tumultuous power and noise. Here there is only silence; the stillness of death.

Here the threat is not chaos with its tempestuous, destructive disruption. Here the threat is impurity and contamination, death’s poison that pollutes the air, and infects the dust, and that defiles human life.

To find himself in such a place is anathema to Ezekiel. He is after all a priest, and he must therefore stand as a bastion and bulwark against impurity.

Yet as we watch we find this morbid silence broken. A voice is speaking, prophesying, uttering the Word of God to these dry bones.

‘Then the Lord said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones hear the word of the Lord…”’

Note that these are no empty words.

This is God’s speech that expresses God’s death-defying power.

This is the Word of God uttered through the prophet from the heart of God, and which is therefore spoken with the very breath of God, God’s ruah.

This is the Word spoken once before by the breath of God into the dust of Eden when the first human became a living being.

And now that same Word is addressed to these bleached bones. It is breathed upon them, and suddenly the bones come together, and take shape with tendons and flesh and skin. Resurrection is being visited upon Israel! And then the breath itself is addressed and the four winds are summoned and the dead become living beings:

‘They lived and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.’

Here however we must move on from Ezekiel and his vision and turn to another place of death and horror, this time not a valley but a hill: the place we find in our reading from John 19. The scene of course is Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. It’s a place whose very name evokes death and bone. And there is Christ, nailed with two others, one on either side of him: a wretched community of the abandoned and forsaken. There is no hope for these three. Whatever they once were is ebbing out slowly and painfully in the death throes of crucifixion.

And beneath these three crosses, and mirroring that community of the wretched, there stands a group of the barely living. They share in the hopelessness of what is taking place. Verse 25:

‘Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.’

Suddenly however their numbed silence is broken as Jesus speaks. Verse 26:

“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘woman, here is your son’. Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother’. And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.’

Once again, as in Eden, and as in Ezekiel’s valley, a Word is uttered and new, creative things come to pass. Not only of course is there Word in this passage but there is breath, ruah, spirit too, Just a little further on in v.30 we read that Jesus bowed his head and ‘gave up his spirit.’ ‘He gave up his spirit’ is literally ‘he handed over his spirit’, and we might say that in one sense this is John’s Pentecost, or at least a pre-figuring of it, as Jesus bestows his Spirit upon these disciples. Strictly speaking John’s Pentecost comes later in chapter 20 where Jesus breathes Holy Spirit upon the disciples in the upper room. But here is a deeper, more foundational Pentecost. Here Word and breath or spirit are brought to bear on this scene as Jesus first speaks to his mother and to the beloved disciple, and then hands over his spirit to them.

Jesus, in his dying moments, is initiating something new.

Here two unrelated people are being called into a new family where one is mother to the son, and one is son to the mother.

Here two people are being bonded into a new community, where they are entrusted with responsibility for one another, and accountability to one another, and care for one another. From the community of the dying, through the One who is at its centre, something new is being birthed, painfully breathed into existence.

Here is prefigured resurrection, Easter Sunday, and Pentecost too.

Here hope flickers into life in the moment of total despair as the dying Christ creates community.

Dare we take this image as a motif for the Church today here in the West? Dare we take it as a lens through which to read our current predicament? I’m interested that in ecumenical gatherings when we look at this passage we always focus on the earlier section where the soldiers decline to tear up Christ’s seamless robe. That of course speaks volumes about unity and ecumenism. But perhaps we should be focusing more on the figure on the cross because that is where we are today – on the cross with the life draining out of us. Of course this is not true world-wide where often the church is buoyant and flourishing. But here in the barren West Christ is dying in his body, the Church. However the crucial factor is that here in this passage resurrection and Pentecost are already happening even in the midst of death – for those with eyes to see it. Here already God’s Word is calling and drawing people together into something new – for those with the vision to discern it.

This brings us to the third of our disciplines for exiles: that of discernment, learning to recognise and affirm where God is already at work, reading the signs. At the end of the day we can put huge efforts into dreaming dreams and catching visions, but we can remain bat-blind to God’s future. To change the metaphor, our task is not to blow Christ’s boat in one direction or another. Our task is to sense the faint breeze of God’s Spirit and to set our sails accordingly. And that requires discernment. Where do we sense God at work amongst us, and how? The fact is that when God moves there are rarely flashing lights and clashing symbols and the dead rising and the lame dancing. God is more subtle, more oblique, more hidden than that. Let’s face it, anyone walking by the foot of the cross sees - what? Mary and the beloved disciple entrusted to one another, and he taking her into his home. They would be forgiven for not noticing anything at all, for not attributing any great significance to it whatsoever. They could hardly be expected to see God at work here in the first stirrings of resurrection. This is not exactly Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones becoming a vast army. Compared to the day of Pentecost in Acts 2 this is low-level stuff, and easily missed. Here are no violent winds and tongues of fire. But the sensitive soul feels God’s warm breath in this place of death. The discerning eye sees God at work. The discerning ears hear the faint, faint rattle of bones.

So it is that along with our disciplines of remembering and waiting goes this third one. Let us learn to practice discernment back in our congregations and our communities. Let us learn together to identify and to name where we see God at work already, in the more hidden ways which so easily go un-noticed. And let us learn to do so before we presume to go too far in reinventing Christ’s church.

We might, however, venture to take just one clue from the exegesis of this passage. You have of course to be careful with John who is always saying so much more than appears on the surface. And I would suggest that it is significant that there is only one other place where Mary appears in John’s Gospel. The one other occasion is in John 2, the wedding at Cana in Galilee where Jesus also calls his mother “woman”, as he does here in John 19. In that passage Mary addresses Jesus and is rebuked for, we are told, ‘Jesus’ time had not yet come’. Now in John 19 Jesus’ time has come and Jesus addresses Mary. But a key feature that links the two passages is the theme of hospitality. In John 2 we have the failed hospitality of the wedding party where the wine ran out; here in chapter 19 we have the hospitality of the beloved disciple taking Mary into his home. Here at the cross failed hospitality is restored. To put it bluntly, here at the climax of the Passion narrative we have salvation as hospitality, Christ’s death issuing in the opening of a home and the creating of new relationships.

With that in mind, how might we learn to read and discern the signs? Where is hospitality discernible in our congregations? Where are our churches points of hospitality to the community? I am not talking here about rooms in the church being let out to the local operatic society who we never see but which brings in some good rent. I’m talking about churches becoming meeting places where we gather with others for any number of reasons, preferably over food, and where we engender trust, and we voice common concerns, and new relationships are formed, and out of all this the community’s well-being is enhanced. And we do not hide or play down our Christian commitment, but that emerges naturally and authentically. And that includes hospitality to the different, and the vulnerable, and the homeless, and the refugee and the asylum seeker - and hospitality includes pursuit of justice.

Can these bones live? The dying Christ brings something new to birth. From his broken body the Spirit is handed over, drawing his people together and reaching out into the world. God grant us grace to discern – and to respond.

Silence.

Death Rattle.

Readings:

(Ezekiel 37: 7, 10b) So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone… and the breath came into them, and they lived…

Matthew 27:50-53. When Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his Spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

“Then Jesus cried with a loud voice and breathed his last.”

That voice cried:

The voice of every cry before or since.
And then came that last breath:
That final, fought-for breath,
wrung from tortured lungs,
seized with searing pain;
The death rattle
squeezed from a body
left lifeless, stiff,
abandoned

“Then Jesus cried with a loud voice and breathed his last.”

That voice cried,

The voice that wakes the dead.

And then came that last breath:

Through the torn curtain of his temple body is passed,
stirring the dust of the streets of Jerusalem,
swirling through the graves,
with the rattle of bones
and the click of joints
wrapped in sinew, flesh and skin:
then the dead danced defiant in the holy city.
Then on into the upper room,
Sounding the voices of every tongue on earth;
The rushing wind that blows
Through Jerusalem,
And Samaria,
And to the ends of the earth.

Holy God,

Whose dying breath became restless wind of life-giving Spirit

Blow through our world:

Through Baghdad and Afghanistan,
Through the West Bank and Jerusalem,
down the Falls Road and the Shankhill,
Through hospitals and secure wards,
Through prisons and detention centres,
Through governments and councils and churches,
Through lives that are dry and dead:

“Thus says the Lord God: come from the four winds, O breath, and breath upon these slain, that they may live.”

Menu

Links

Bible Study

Tuesday

8th July 2003

Hope: Exile, Resurrection & the Discipline of Discernment

Highlights

Search Hotline

Clare Short

Moderator's Address

Have Your Say