Texts: Ezekiel 17:22-24; 2 Corinthians 5:6-17; Mark 4:26-34
We have a whole lot of common sayings in the English language to remind us that things aren’t always as they seem. Appearances, we say, can be deceptive. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers! All that glitters is not gold. Still waters run deep. Don’t judge a parcel by its wrapping, or a book by its cover. Seeing might be believing, but sometimes it shouldn’t be – sometimes we shouldn’t be too quick to believe what we see.
All this is particularly true for people of faith. Look back over the millennia of our faith history and you will find that things very rarely were just as they looked. Abraham and Sarah looked as good as dead, certainly incapable of producing a child. The situation of the slaves in Egypt looked hopeless. The dead Christ on the Cross looked utterly defeated. The disciples saw no reason to go on. And somewhere in between those earlier and later scenes of hopelessness and despair stood Ezekiel with his strange message of hope.
Just as Jeremiah was the prophet with the principal call to prepare his people to go into exile, so Ezekiel, his younger contemporary, was called by God to prepare for the end of the exile. And just as nobody believed Jeremiah’s message of doom until it was too late, so nobody believed Ezekiel’s message of hope because it was just too incredible to believe.
We can have some sympathy for the his fellow exiles. Things had not just gone from bad to worse, they had gone from calamitous to even worse, for the people of Judah. They had been defeated by the Babylonians, and their brightest and best had been rounded up and carted off into exile in Babylon . Among the exiles was their king Joachin, and, of course, Ezekiel himself. All that was bad enough, but worse was to follow.
The Babylonians had installed a puppet king in Jerusalem , called Hedekiah; and in the fullness of time he had decided he could outwit his Babylonian masters by making an alliance with the strongman of Egypt , the latest Pharaoh. But when push came to shove, the Egyptians left all the pushing and shoving to Hedekiah, who was no match for the Babylonians, who understandably felt a bit aggrieved at Hedekiah’s perfidy, and reacted as one might expect.
Less expected, perhaps, was Yahweh’s fury at Hedekiah. Far from supporting his act of rebellion on the ground that anything his people tried was to be blessed, Yahweh took strong exception to Hedekiah breaking the oath of allegiance he had sworn to the Babylonian king. Why? Because he had sworn that oath in Yahweh’s name. He had therefore disgraced the name of Yahweh when he broke the oath. So Yahweh turned against Hedekiah and his fate was well and truly sealed.
This is the situation facing Ezekiel at the time of this morning’s passage. Judah is now completely ruined. The legitimate king is a prisoner in Babylon , and the puppet king back in Jerusalem has led the remnant in a disastrous military folly resulting in further devastation. And Yahweh, their God, has been grossly offended, and has withdrawn his favour. Given all that, we can see why Ezekiel’s task of encouragement was tricky.
Yet it was precisely in these circumstances of hopelessness that Ezekiel preached his message of hope. In this morning’s extract he is speaking in a rather obscure parable, perhaps because it was too dangerous to be too direct. He doesn’t name names, in fact he doesn’t even speak of Judah by name. He uses code: he appears to be talking about Lebanon and its famous cedar trees. However, his fellow exiles would recognise that this is code for the Temple and Jerusalem , since the Temple was built with large amounts of cedar timber from Lebanon .
He says that God is going to break off the highest tip of the mighty cedar – that is, he is going to remove the present king, head of the house of David – and create a new one, which will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches. Does that ring any bells with us as Christians? Well, it ought to – it sounds rather like The Parable of the Mustard seed, which St Mark gives us in today’s gospel reading. He quotes Jesus as saying of the mustard plant, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.
In both cases the image is of something so small as to be almost invisible, yet growing into something so large that the multitudes, represented by the birds of the air, can find rest and shelter in it. In the midst of all the distress and pain of exile and betrayal, Ezekiel hears from God that new growth is coming. The past is not going to be written off – this is not an entirely fresh start – the new growth will come from the old tree – the Messiah and the Messianic Kingdom will sprout from Judah . The exiles still have a future and it is a glorious one.
How incredible all that must have seemed, even to Ezekiel himself, as he gazed out of his window in Babylon . No wonder his audience found it so difficult to comprehend. But is it in any more incredible than the story Jesus gave his disciples on a dusty hill in Galilee overlooking the Lake ? Is it any more likely that any of them caught even the smallest glimpse of the vision that Jesus was putting before them that day? They were much more likely to be debating the horticultural details among themselves. [“Mustard plants aren’t all that big, are they?”]
There were many such moments in Christ’s teaching that must have sounded frankly bizarre. Just him, and twelve of them with all their failings, and a few converts. What sort of kingdom could they forge between them?
Appearances are deceptive. Look at a paddock that’s been recently ploughed and harrowed. It looks like a large brown area of nothing very much. It is impossible to tell if anything has yet been sown in it. But even if the farmer hasn’t sown anything in it, we know it is full of seeds; we know if we come back in a few weeks time there will be a rich diversity of weeds growing, if nothing else. If a crop has been sown, then there will be a harvest to reap in due course. The paddock might appear dry and lifeless, but it is actually full of potential life, and in one form or another it will soon show forth and start growing. That’s what the Kingdom of God is like. The seed has been sown; now it’s only a question of time.
It reminds me of a clip I saw on TV a few years back when Malborough had those terrible fires. A local farmer was being interviewed against a backdrop of a huge range of blackened hills. The interviewer, probably a townie, was clearly shocked at what he was seeing. He asked the farmer if they could ever grow grass again. “My oath!” said the old guy. “There’ll be black for a while yet, but there’ll turn green again. You can be sure of that.” That’s the confidence of an Ezekiel.
And that is the sort of confidence we need today. It would be easy to look out of our windows today and see only hopelessness, not only overseas but in many aspects of our own country. Some statistics paint a grim picture of how we’re doing as a society. Everyday we hear of new problems, just this week the media have had another little run on elder abuse, on the party pill culture, we’ve had another outrageous sex attack, and a strike in our hospitals. It would be easy to look out of our windows and see only scorched earth.
And yet our faith tells us that the seeds of the kingdom have already been sown, and the harvest will come. In the meantime St Paul calls us to stand in Ezekiel’s shoes. He uses different terminology, but the meaning is the same. He says we have been given the ministry of reconciliation – Christ’s ministry of reconciliation – to call people – our people – the exiles of our own time – back to God.
And he uses a fascinating term: not apostles, or prophets, or spokespeople, but “ambassadors’. Think about that term for a moment. What do we know about ambassadors? Well, they come into a country to represent their own government, don’t they? They do not speak off their own bat, but deliver their Government’s messages. And they are entitled to be received politely and be afforded personal security.
As Ambassadors for Christ we are to bring to the people of this country, including those who live in this parish, his message of hope and forgiveness and reconciliation and love. We are to tell the people not to be taken in by appearances – that the seeds have been sown and the harvest is coming. And we are to be assured that we are under his protection at all times.
The only difficult bit is believing what we hear despite what we see all around us. But then, the exiles did return to Judah , and the twelve followers of Jesus have become about 2 billion. Something must be going on, eh?
No comments:
Post a Comment