Ezekiel 37:1-14 "All These Bones" Scott Hoezee

It is a sad statement on the century now past that we can rather easily imagine the scene Ezekiel describes in his famous 37^th chapter. Whether or not the people in Ezekiel's original audience had ever seen such a valley full of bones, we now have. We've seen the mass graves of Auschwitz and Kosovo. Our minds cannot erase, much though we'd like to, the carnage of Rwanda and particularly of that one photo of a church sanctuary littered with the skeletal remains of those who sought refuge in God's house but who found instead swift death at the hands of macheté-wielding thugs. Perhaps most dramatically we've seen the killing fields of Cambodia with bones and skulls stretching to the horizon.

We know what Ezekiel saw and we know that such a scene represents death in all its finality, intensity, and horror. And so we also know what we would say if someone asked us, "Do you see any life in all that carnage? Can those emaciated victims of Hitler's Final Solution live? Can Pol Pot's legacy of murder lead to life?" We know what we'd say and we know that from just the human side of things our answer would be a resounding, "No!"

If you've ever toured one of the Nazi concentration camp memorials you know of the almost choking sense of death and finality you sense in those places. When years ago I visited Buchenwald, I was struck by what a glorious place of natural beauty it is. Located near Weimar in what was then East Germany, Buchenwald overlooks a broad vista of rolling hills and valleys. Even in the dead of winter when I was there the view was lovely.

And yet it wasn't lovely to me. Buchenwald, like the other camps I've seen at Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Plötzensee, hangs so heavy with a sense of mass extermination that all else is eclipsed. By the time you've viewed the memorial plaques, glanced at the grim photos of corpses stacked like cord wood, and passed by the crematorium onto which is now engraved the words, "Remember How We Died Here," there is little left in your mind than the overwhelming sense of death's tragedy and of its apparent absolute finality. There is no beauty there and often very little sense of hope.

Son of man, can these dry bones live? No, they cannot. From our human side of things the bones cannot live. From our human side of things death is the end. We cannot bring anyone back. Even with the wonders of today's medical technology there is nothing that can be done for even a body that has been dead for more than five or so minutes, much less for a body as far gone as to be a skeleton.

Ezekiel saw skeletons--lots and lots of them. These were people who did not receive burial for some reason. The sheer number of bones seemed to indicate some kind of mass carnage or catastrophe. The dry condition of the bones lets Ezekiel know that these people have been dead a long time. Can these bones live--these long-dead, desiccated, jumbled-together remnants of people who are long gone from this earth? No, they cannot. Verse 2 tells us that Yahweh gave Ezekiel a pretty thorough tour of this terrible place. They walked back and forth, through and among the bones. Ezekiel saw no life.

Can these bones live? The question was ridiculous. So much so that Ezekiel was savvy enough to realize that it is more of a rhetorical question. Perhaps that is why Ezekiel is bold enough to swat the ball back into Yahweh's court. "Son of man, can these bones live?" "You tell me, O Sovereign Yahweh. You tell me."

In the face of such a scene of death's finality, people of faith have no choice but to throw it back into Yahweh's hands. We know the answer to the question insofar as our human perspective and ability is concerned. If there is more that can be said in this situation, God will have to be the one to say it. If there is anything to be done to or for these bones, God will have to be the one to do it. "Can these bones live?" The suspense of faith is holding our collective breath to see what Yahweh says in answer to his own question.

Speaking of breath, the Hebrew word for "breath" is ruach, and it pops up fully ten times in just these fourteen verses. Clearly it is the key word for this context. It starts in 5 when Yahweh tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones that God would indeed restore the breath of life to them. But before we consider that any further we need to notice the silliness of what Yahweh asks Ezekiel to do. Ezekiel needs to stand up, clear his throat, and preach a sermon to the skeletons! Imagine my going to Woodlawn Cemetery tomorrow, standing on a bench, and then saying to all the headstones stretched out before me, "Good afternoon. You're probably wondering why I called all of you here today . . . well, that is, what I have to say to you . . . ."

Nobody is listening! There is no one to hear! Ezekiel has had to perform his share of wild and crazy things in this book but earnestly preaching a sermon to this valley of bones is far more outlandish than most of the other prophetic signs he had to perform. Yet this spectacle is less ridiculous than we might at first think. Preaching to the obviously dead is actually not so rare after all--not within the context of Ezekiel and not even yet today.

In verse 11 of this passage we hear Yahweh quote a saying or a sentiment that had been circulating among the exiles in Babylon. With Jerusalem destroyed, the Temple in ruins, many of their children and loved ones dead, it seemed to most Israelites like the end of the world. So they'd gather together in little clusters of lament and say to one another, "Our bones are dried up! Our hope is gone! We are cut off from all joy!" The Israelites had become the living dead. Their spirits were shriveled up within them.

This entire book was written in the shadow of what Walter Brueggemann calls the Nullpunkt, which is a German word for "zero point." The Nullpunkt of faith is that moment of crisis when all seems lost and when, humanly speaking at least, all really is lost. For Israel all of her prior understandings of covenant had been shattered. The belief that Jerusalem was inviolate and the Temple indestructible proved hollow. In the hymn "Abide with Me" we sing the line, "Death and decay in all around I see." The exiles in Ezekiel's day would no doubt amend that to read, "Death and decay is all that I see."

What was next for Israel? Was there a "next" to anticipate? Out of this time of profound spiritual crisis emerged the distinctive voice of the prophets. The job of Ezekiel, and for that matter of Isaiah and Jeremiah and the others, was to declare that God was not undone by the catastrophe of recent days. God remained sovereign and what's more, Yahweh was determined that he would never be "Israel-less" in the world. Yahweh would always have his Israel! But from the crises of history, from the death that surrounds us, and from the ways by which the bleakness of our human situation can so easily make us spiritually dead on the inside, this hope is something that completely and utterly depends on the gift of God.

Everything depends on whether or not Yahweh will return to us the very breath of life itself. We are powerless even to summon this breath, much less to grant it to ourselves or anyone else. In other words, from the human side of things there is the undeniable reality of death, and there is not a thing we ourselves can do about it. We are finite. There are limits. The universe itself cannot continue forever.

That's what I meant a few minutes ago when I said that the laughable spectacle of Ezekiel standing up to deliver a sermon to a bone-yard is maybe not as odd or unusual as we might at first think. There's a sense in which I am doing the same thing tonight and every time I preach: I stand up before creatures who must die. And unlike my dog we know that we will die. We do look ahead to horizons beyond our grasp and wonder what, if anything, it all means or adds up to.

Any hope that we have as believers cannot be based on any trends or possibilities that we see within this physical sphere of life as we know it. We cannot expect that science or medicine will break through with the news that we've found a loophole, a way to escape death, a way to keep the sun lit forever and the universe to stop expanding itself to the breaking point. No, the hope we have has to take square account of death and its inevitability. We also cannot base our hope on the Greek belief that there is something inherent within our human souls that is death-proof all of its own accord.

And here I realize I skate on what for some of you is thin ice. We don't want to face the possibility that death could mean not only the end of this physical self but of what we might call our "soul" as well. Yet in at least the Old Testament there clearly was the belief that death was the end of everything, body and soul. By the time you get to the New Testament it is clear that in God's plan the essence of who we are, our souls, survive death. But even then it is not because of some quality our souls "naturally" posses but only as the result of God's gift to us. If it were not for the grace of God, death would be the end of us forever. It is the ultimate Nullpunkt--the place at which we are finished. We are unable to do a thing for ourselves or to receive anything from other human beings, either.

But Yahweh is the God of resurrection! Can these bones live? No. Even if somehow sinew and tendon and flesh could be put back onto them, as happens in verses 7-8, can they breathe and be whole and complete living souls again? No--not unless Yahweh himself picks up these dead folks and, as he did in the beginning with Adam and Eve, personally blows the breath of life back into their nostrils! It is all of God.

It is the realm of faith that grabs hold of all that. Science or any other strictly human perspective cannot proffer us any hope. The boundary line of death is where all human strivings and probings must end. But whereas all people see the boundary line of death, we Christians see it as a border with two sides, and on the other side is our God of resurrection life whose gift is to renew our life by keeping alive our souls and promising one day to bring back also our bodies.

Can these bones live? Can this body and this person who I am as well as all that makes each one of you who you are live? Those are the burning questions of human life. In Ezekiel 37 it is God, however, who asks the question and so Ezekiel turns the question back on God, too. "You tell me, O Sovereign Yahweh. Can these bones live?" God's answer is "Yes, they can!" And so Ezekiel preaches this message to the dead people around him--to the bones bleaching in the sun of that scorching valley as well as to the dead spirits of the exiles in Babylon who felt bereft of hope and cut off from God.

God will not be without a people. In fact, before this vision is finished it becomes clear to Ezekiel that the many bones he sees in that valley are not the slain of some single battle in Israel's history. What Ezekiel sees is all of Israel: every man, woman, and child of God's people who has ever died. And God here promises to bring them all back. To bring them back, to put them back into a true homeland, and so in this way let the people know once and for all and forever that Yahweh alone is God and that we will dwell with him as a result of his Word and Spirit of Life.

It will come as no surprise to you that in scholarly circles there has been for centuries a furious debate as to how much of Ezekiel 37 may properly be read in the light of the New Testament doctrine of resurrection through Christ Jesus. Given that this is the only dramatic example of any kind of Old Testament talk of a physical resurrection, it is a bit odd that the New Testament writers made virtually no reference to this vision. Additionally, if you restrict your perspective to just Ezekiel 37, it is true that you would not necessarily draw a doctrine of eternal life out of these words.

However, if you are willing to accept the unity of Scripture as inspired by God's one Holy Spirit--which means also being willing to see Ezekiel 37 as part of a larger whole which includes all other passages--then clearly this is one of the Bible's clarion visions of resurrection hope. The grave is not the end. Yahweh is not unmade by death or hemmed in by the very finitude he himself created. Nor will Yahweh let finitude and the limits of this life be the last word on us. He will not be without his people, which means we will never be without our God!

As Paul would write centuries after Ezekiel's time, for now we see through a glass darkly--our eyes cannot fully penetrate to what is yet to come in God's far country. But the message of the prophets gives us just enough glimpses to let us know that what is to come is glorious. There is a home for God's people. There is new life for body and soul.

And so we come to end of this series on Ezekiel. We've already peeked ahead to chapter 40 and have seen the promised return of God's Spirit to a new Temple one day. What remains in this book is a lot of detailed material on the measurements for a new city and temple. Ezekiel is a profoundly odd book and, throughout much of it, also a dismally dark book. In the ten sermons of this series there have been times when I've wondered about how work-able a series on so strange a book would be. Yet tonight we come to the end and find that out of the Nullpunkt of Israel's experience we find hope for the Nullpunkt of our common human lot. And unlike Ezekiel's original hearers, we can peg that hope to the living presence of one who was dead once but is alive now and forever: Jesus Christ our Lord.

The last verse of this book comes in Ezekiel 48:35. There Ezekiel has finished laying out the dimensions of God's ultimate home for his people. The last touch on that description comes in this final verse when Ezekiel reads off for the people the name engraved on the entrance to the holy city. In Hebrew the name is Yahweh Shammah, which means "Yahweh Is Here." Or maybe an equivalent translation could be something along the lines of Immanuel, "God with us."

As a prophet it was Ezekiel's task to pluck the strings of the people's imagination with lyrical descriptions of things and possibilities beyond what we can attain on our own, and in this way to foster a thoroughgoing hope. He succeeded. In this universe of death and decay, Yahweh's question still rings across the broken landscape of our history: Can these bones live? The answer of Immanuel, who is the resurrection and the life, the alpha and the omega, the great shepherd of the sheep and the firstborn of all us dead and dying folks--his answer to this question is simple, clear, and redolent of hope: Can these bones live? Yes. The Sovereign God in Jesus Christ our Lord has spoken it. Amen.