Easter Sunday has come and past. Christ is risen!!! By virtue of Christ’s resurrection, death is defeated and we are given new life. We are promised that Christ’s resurrection is our resurrection. Paul tells us in Romans that in baptism, we have been put to death with Christ and since this is so, we too will walk in newness of life just as Christ has been raised from the dead. This is most certainly true.
This last Sunday we celebrated this defeat of death and subversion of reality as we know it. After all, in reality, death should win; it should have the final word. But we know that God in Christ has the final word and that word is life. In our text today, God promises resurrection: God promises regeneration and restoration to the exiled people of Israel. By this promise and act, God proclaims, the people will know that God is God. God defines Godself in today’s text by the promise and act of resurrection. God defines Godself as the one who creates life where there is only death. In this season of Easter we hear again and again that God has given life to the dead and will bring about life in our death.
But, amidst this resurrection celebration, we look to all corners of the globe and still see death. There are plenty of dry, dry bones in our world. If God were to show me around the world like God showed the prophet Ezekiel around the valley I am certain that I would not see many skeletons or corpses getting up to walk. I would see death, and in the face of this death I would see so many people haunted by meaninglessness and despair. I am sure I would wonder at the dryness and multitude of the bones, at the utter hopelessness of it all. Our world is full of dry bones, as far as our eyes can see. While we are not placed in the midst of the valley of dry bones by the hand of God as Ezekiel was, modern media allows us to witness just how dry, how hopeless it all is. Just turn on the news:
A month and a half since the earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan there is still death and destruction as far as the eye can see. In Japan we see dry, dry bones.
Millions of Haitians are still recovering from the quake almost a year and a half ago. Many of these Haitians are still homeless and a great deal fell victim to a severe cholera outbreak that followed the quake. We are surrounded by dry, dry bones.
As we hear reports of the US economy’s recovery, millions of our fellow citizens are still jobless, homeless, and hungry. Many of these are caught in cycles of poverty that stretch back for generations (Bread.org/hunger). We are standing amongst dry, dry bones.
People that we all personally know and love have died in recent months. I know I’ve lost people already this year. The valley in which we are standing is full of dry, dry bones.
Amidst all of this death…resurrection and the victory of God over death is hard to hear. It even seems absurd. It certainly defies our expectations of what should be. This season and today’s text challenge us to see all of this through new eyes, the way, perhaps, that God sees the world. There is despair as far as we can see, but there is hope as far as God can see.
In Ezekiel’s vision, this ordinary mortal is made to see the full extent of the death that abounds. In his time there was much of this to see. Ezekiel was a prophet in Judah leading up to and during the Babylonian Exile. This historical event was not just a relocation, a move to Babylon from Judah for the Israelites. No, the Babylonian Exile of the sixth century BCE was a displacement of a whole people. It was an occupation, a siege, a dislocation, and a decimation of a people and a culture. As David Garber puts it, “the Babylonians tortured the inhabitants of Jerusalem with siege warfare that lasted almost two years, leading to famine, disease, and despair…they destroyed the city of Jerusalem, razed the Temple to the ground, killed many of the inhabitants, and forced the rest to migrate to Babylon.” Ezekiel’s own wife dies before the exile and the prophet is not permitted to mourn, just as the people were not to be permitted to mourn for the destruction of the Temple. Ezekiel sees a valley of hopelessness.
He is shown around the valley. Yahweh leads him all about there so that he takes it all in. Having seen the extent of the dry bones, Ezekiel is astonished by the hopelessness of it all. The bones are so very dry, he notes, and there are so many of them. Those who were once held up by these bones have long, long since passed. It is as if a great multitude was struck dead as in battle and was then left to rot. These skeletons are not those to which we are accustomed. They are not the skeletons of Disney pirates or cute Halloween decorations. They are not even the skeletons that hang in our classrooms as learning tools. These are the bones of those who died at another’s hand. These are the bones of those whose life was taken from them. These are the bones of Ezekiel’s dead neighbors. There is no hope, no life to be seen here. Just death. Nothing more.
Yet, by virtue of Yahweh’s revivifying promise and action, Ezekiel is made to see more than his mortal eyes allow. God poses an absurd, perhaps even preposterous question to the prophet, “Mortal,” God asks, “can these bones live?” Is there any hope in despair? Were I Ezekiel, still astonished by the multitude and dryness of these old bones, I would have thought, of course not Yahweh. You have shown me. There is no life here. There is no hope. These people have been struck down and there is nothing more to do but mourn and despair. But, rather than presume to know the answer to God’s riddle, Ezekiel passes the question back to Yahweh. And Yahweh invites Ezekiel, this ordinary mortal, to see with resurrection eyes. Yes, God commands Ezekiel to participate in the regeneration of these bones. By the Word of God spoken to the bones and the breath by an ordinary human being, by the promise of resurrection and the infusion of breath, the bones are revivified and death does not have the victory. Life has the victory because Yahweh has the victory. In the midst of such death, of such hopelessness and despair Ezekiel is made to see life and hope. Ezekiel sees with resurrection eyes.
God tells Ezekiel, what you have seen here is the whole house of Israel. Yahweh has heard Ezekiel’s people cry: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost, we are cut off completely. Ezekiel’s absurd and spectacular vision of the enlivening of old dry bones is God’s response to this lament. God’s people cry this cry and YHWH responds by showing the prophet Ezekiel something impossible: resurrection. New life. Yahweh responds to the cries of His people by promising and bringing about life where only death can be seen.
Where there is only death, God sees life. Where there is despair God sees hope. For God, the reality of resurrection, the reality of life from death, is greater than the reality of death. And this is because God brings this impossible reality about. The faithful and trustworthy creator of life is the progenitor of hope where there is only despair. Yahweh will deliver from every oppressor, even death. This is who God is in relation to God’s people. God has a history of listening to the cries of God’s people and bringing about resurrection where there is only death, and hope where there is only despair. After all, God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, God gave the same people sustenance in the desert, raised a widow’s son at the hand of Elijah, and this is all even before God delivered the Israelites from the Babylonian Exile! The people of this resurrecting God are called to see with resurrection eyes. God calls God’s people to see the death in the world, indeed, even to walk around and be amongst the dry, dry bones, but not as those who are finally beaten by death and despair but as those who trust in the promise of new life.
The gift of faith allows us to trust that Yahweh, our God, triumphs over death with life. We can see this only with the eyes of faith, with resurrection eyes. Seeing with these eyes does not blind us to the death that surrounds us, so that we naively see only life and ignore the world’s despair.
Quite the opposite, seeing with the eyes of resurrection means seeing the death that abounds clearly, but seeing more clearly life in those dry bones. God’s people are called into the deepest suffering and death that the world has to offer, to suffer in, with and for the world, but to do so with resurrection eyes, so that despair does not finally triumph but so hope abounds. These resurrection eyes strengthen God’s people for work in the world.
Resurrection eyes saw the reality of hope even amidst the hopelessness of the plague 500 years ago. There are numerous reports of christisn leaders who stayed with their people even through periods of quarantine to care for the sick. Ordinary people with resurrection eyes gave their lives to care for the terminal, and still do so today.
Ordinary people with resurrection eyes see hope today in the dry bones of the victims of natural disaster, in the dry bones of the victims of disease, racism, violence, and economic injustice. Hunger, a problem at least as old as history, is combated by people of faith around the globe as they advocate for fairer legislation and distribution of our abundant resources.
Ordinary people with resurrection eyes see, as Ezekiel did, that where there is death, life is possible; That where despair seems to reign there is reason to hope; that this hope is to be lived amidst the driest of the dry bones.
By virtue of the resurrection of Christ, God has given you resurrection eyes, to see and be hope where there is only despair.
This subversion of the reality of death and the triumph of life over death that we call resurrection is so utterly unexpected, surprising, and even absurd, that it only makes sense when one has known resurrection in the gift of faith. It is Easter, and at this time we are reminded that we are given new life and the hope of resurrection that breaks into our here and now so that we can live in, with, and for a whole world full of dry, dry bones. With resurrection eyes we live with the dry bones without hopelessness, meaninglessness, or despair, but with faith in the God who is defined by resurrection. We see with resurrection eyes, because we have been known by the resurrected one. We see with resurrection eyes because we have been known by the one who hears and responds to the cries of the world. We see with resurrection eyes because we are called to speak God’s word of hope to a hopeless world.
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