Canter Bridge

Ezekiel is perhaps the biblical anthology’s oddest prophet.

His written legacy combines the close-order attention to form and process that is common to the priest he was. Yet priestly conviction becomes combined to occasionally weird effect with the apocalyptic tendency to receive messages from God when the heavens are opened.

When Ezekiel locates himself ‘among the exiles … in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar’, it is not at all clear that he would expect the god of the ash heap that Jerusalem had become to show up in that distant, captive, and—one might surmises—god-forsaken place. Yet YHWH does appear. He shows up in the kind of theophany that almost by itself might convince this prophet that destruction of YHWH’s house back in the rubble of Jerusalem did not represent the end of the story and the defrocking of the God who once lived in it and yet had failed to protect Judah from the Babylonian whip. There is temple-esque imagery throughout the prophet’s detailed description of the ‘vision from heaven’ that fell upon him by the rivers of Babylon.

Among other details, one notes the agility of YHWH’s throne, powered as it is by four ‘living creatures’ as formidable as they are quick. These ‘living ones’ seem dedicated to getting YHWH wherever he wants to go, almost ‘at the speed of light’ as we might conceive it today:

When they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved. Their rims were tall and awesome, for the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. When the living creatures moved, the wheels moved beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. Wherever the spirit would go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. When they moved, the others moved; when they stopped, the others stopped; and when they rose from the earth, the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

The point is likely not that Ezekiel saw a UFO or two. It seems rather to be the infinitely agile mobility of YHWH’s throne. His creatures bear him wherever he wishes without reference to the limitations of movement that are inherent to created realities. Before ball bearings and standard-sized wheels, Ezekiel describes a deity who in his people’s laments seems tied to and even discredited by the place in which he had lived among his people, a city now reduced to smoking ruins.

This somewhat psychedelic introduction to the book of Ezekiel presents at the outset of that strange work an unsettling and deeply encouraging claim: YHWH can go anywhere he wants. You never know where he might show up next.

Even here. By these damned rivers of Babylon.