Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Pentecost, 19^th of May, 2024

Ezekiel 37:1-14
John 15:26-27 16:4b-15

I have been reading a lot of poetry this year, and apparently the historian in me is not satisfied to simply enjoy poetry. I seem to need to analyse and contextualise poems in the same way I do Bible readings. So, since I am currently reading a collection of poems by the nineteenth-century English poet Christina Rossetti, I have also just finished a biography of her. (You all know at least one of Christina’s poems, because ‘Love came down at Christmas’ is hymn 317 in Together in Song.) Christina was a deeply committed high church Anglican and in her poetry she often looks forward to death, as a time when she would be reunited with those she loved, would receive in fullness the love she had been unable to experience while alive, and would be united with Jesus. So I was sad to discover that apparently her actual death was unpeaceful; she was depressed, ‘hysterical,’ heard by neighbours to scream, and on her last night needed to be tied to her bed. Her brother William blamed Christina’s confessor, the Reverend Charles Gutch, who visited her as she was dying. William wrote that Gutch ‘took it upon himself to be austere where all the conditions of the case called him to be solacing and soothing’. In the last month of her life William thought that her mind was ‘always now possessed by gloomy thoughts as to the world of spirits,’ and he recorded that she once said, ‘How dreadful to be eternally wicked! For in Hell you must be so eternally!’ Watching his faith-filled sister’s death confirmed William’s own agnosticism.[1]

Christina’s death, and William’s detestation of the Reverend Charles Gutch, are reminders to me to be careful how I talk about death. It is not the work of the church to fill people with ‘gloomy thoughts as to the world of spirits’. But it is impossible to avoid the thought of death when listening to today’s reading from the prophecies of Ezekiel. After all, the dead in today’s reading are very, very, extremely, dead. Today’s prophecy reminds us that we live our lives amid death, and yet, because God is God, even in death there is the hope of life.

One of the central events described in the Hebrew Scriptures, as important to the life and faith of the Jewish people as the Exodus from Egypt, is the Babylonian Exile. We hear about it again and again in the Psalms and the writings of the prophets. As you will remember, because I keep referring to it, in 597 BC the Babylonians conquered the southern Kingdom of Judah and took thousands of its leading citizens, including Ezekiel, into exile in Babylon. The puppet king the Babylonians had left on the throne, Zedekiah, later revolted against them and in response in 587 BC the Babylonians destroyed the entire city of Jerusalem, including the Temple. Only the poorest and the weakest were left to try and survive in the city’s desolated ruins. The defeat of Jerusalem, the end of the Davidic monarchy, and the destruction of the Temple were seen by both the Exiles and those who remained behind as signs of the defeat of Yahweh by the gods of Babylon.

Not unnaturally, this led the exiles to despair, and it is that despair that today’s vision answers. Far from Jerusalem, living and dying outside the land of the promise, the exiles felt that God had abandoned them. They were afraid that in the Exile they would lose their identity as a people. More than a century before the Assyrians had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and taken its people, ten of the twelve tribes, into captivity. Those taken into exile never returned; those who remained in Israel became the Samaritans. The exiles from Judah worried that the same thing would happen to them, that they would lose their identity as a people and be absorbed into Babylon. They cried out to the Lord, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ But in his vision the Lord shows Ezekiel that even the driest of bones can live.

The hand of the Lord comes upon Ezekiel and the Spirit of the Lord takes him to a valley filled with bones. The Lord leads Ezekiel ‘all round’ the bones, which in Hebrew is sabib sabib, sounding like flies buzzing. We miss the emphasis of the Hebrew in our translation; the Hebrew literally says, ‘And behold there were very many bones lying in the valley, and behold they were very dry’. ‘And behold’ – look at them. There are many, many bones, and they are very, very dead. There is simply no way that these bones can be revived. The dead are dead. God then asks Ezekiel: ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ Just in case Ezekiel was not aware enough of the finality of death, he is addressed not as priest or prophet but as ‘Mortal,’ one destined to die. Whether Ezekiel’s answer, ‘O Lord God, you know,’ shows his faith in God or his desire to avoid the question is uncertain. But he is right. God does know.

God gives Ezekiel a task, to prophecy to the dead bones. He prophecies that God will bring the bones both to life and to the knowledge of God, and as he does, what he is prophesying begins to comes true: ‘suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone’. Ezekiel is watching decomposition in reverse: after the bones are joined sinews and flesh appear on them and skin covers them. The bodies stand upright, but they are not yet alive, there is no breath in them. If this is resurrection, it is resurrection brought to a sudden crashing halt. I must confess that whenever I reach this point of Ezekiel’s prophecy I find myself thinking of zombies and other forms of the walking dead.

Now God tells Ezekiel to call the four winds to breathe on them. Ezekiel says: ‘I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.’ In Hebrew, the words for spirit, wind, and breath are the same word – ruach. This word is used again and again: ‘Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause ruach to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put ruach in you, and you shall live’ … Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the ruach, prophesy, mortal, and say to the ruach: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four ruach, O ruach, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the ruach came into them, and they lived’. The breath of life, which comes with the four winds, is the Spirit: God’s Spirit is the key. Without the Spirit, as Ezekiel saw, existence is just flesh and blood. But with God’s spirit, there is life. And there is nowhere, no time, and no situation that can keep the ruach away from God’s people.

The people of Judah did not believe in life after death. This is not actually a story of physical resurrection; the bones and the risen dead are a metaphor. As God then interprets the event for Ezekiel: the bones are the whole house of Israel, who will live again when the Exile ends. The promise to Abraham will be fulfilled a second time with the return to the Promised Land. The story will not end there: ‘then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord’. The people will come to know the Lord, as Ezekiel prophesied to the dry bones that they would. The Spirit of God, God’s breath, ruach, has entered the bones, just as God breathed life into Adam at the dawn of creation. The question the people were asking was not, ‘is there life after death?’ but ‘is God still faithful?’ The answer is that while the Exile may have made it seem that God had been defeated, the Spirit of God is with God’s people in the direst of circumstances. God is always faithful.

Today’s gospel reading describes God’s faithfulness in another of those dire circumstances. We are again listening to the final teaching Jesus gave his disciples on the night that he was betrayed. He is going to die and, ‘because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts’. Their teacher and friend is going to be executed. He will be as dead as the dry bones to whom Ezekiel prophesied. Yet Jesus comforts the disciples with the promise of the coming of the Spirit: ‘it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you’. This will be God’s Spirit as Advocate, Paraclete, the one who walks alongside the disciples offering strength and encouragement. Jesus is leaving, ‘I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer,’ but God is not leaving the disciples alone. The Father will once again enter human history, this time through the Spirit. The Spirit will continue Jesus’ work, sharing his message: ‘He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’ Jesus is about to depart, but his way will continue. A new time in history will begin; new things will happen; and in Jesus’ physical absence he will be present in the Spirit, the Spirit of truth who will testify on Jesus’ behalf. The disciples will not have to live with Jesus’ absence, despite his death, because the Spirit will make him present and continue the task of interpreting him. This is as true for us as for the disciples to whom Jesus spoke. Two thousand years after Jesus lived and died, the Spirit continues to speak the presence of Jesus into our hearts. We have not been left alone.

Unlike the people to whom Ezekiel prophesied, Christians do not believe that death is the end of everything. Because of Jesus’ resurrection we do have the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. I do wish that as she lay dying Christina Rossetti had held on to this as a hope, rather than experienced it as a threat of Hell; that she had thought less about ‘the world of spirits’ and more about the Spirit. Her brother William, despite his own agnosticism, obviously thought the Reverend Charles Gutch should have been ‘solacing and soothing’ in reassuring Christina that her destination was Heaven, rather than Hell. But were I to have been at her bedside, and this is obviously completely anachronistic given that I am a twenty-first century minister, I would have talked neither of Hell nor of Heaven. I would have reminded Christina of God’s enduring faithfulness, and reassured her that God’s Spirit is with us even if we are in exile, in fear, in grief – even when we are dead. No matter the situation the Spirit of God ensures that we are never left alone, and we have faith that this is as true in death as in life. It is certainly true in situations that feel like death. At Pentecost, we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit and the birth-day of the church with joy and candles and lots of red, and such joy is always appropriate. But the Spirit comes to us in our despair, as well as in our joy. The Spirit enables the driest of bones to live again.

I want to end today with a poem that was not written by Christina, but by a poet who met her when he was young and unknown and who was influenced by her poetry:[2] Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Do not be afraid of night, of death, of exile, of grief. The Holy Spirit, God’s ruach, still broods over the world with warm breast and bright wings. Amen.

[1] Frances Thomas, Christina Rossetti: A Biography (London: Virago, 1994) pp. 370-372.

[2] Frances Thomas, Christina Rossetti, p. 255.