Canter Bridge

Ezekiel makes for hard reading.

My own rather buoyant hopefulness has taken some hits in these weeks of reading slowly through this insistent book, determined as it is to mark out the profile of Israel’s failure and cut the ground from under false optimism. The text is punctuated by theodicy—what some have defined as ‘justifying the ways of God to man’—by the phrase ‘Then you shall know that I am YHWH’.

It is a dark promise hurled at the casual ease with which Ezekiel’s Israel was capable of getting on with its business while ignoring the demanding presence of YHWH in its midst. Knowledge and ignorance are seldom neutral, almost never bereft of the element of will, rarely unclothed by a prior decision about what we will choose to perceive and what we will pass over.

So does Ezekiel’s damning promise emerge in the wake of one portrait of impending judgment after another: ‘Then you shall know that I am YHWH.

Yet it is testament to the priority of mercy over judgment in the biblical testimony that even this severest of works eventually turns that promise round to blessing. After one of the most memorable sustained pieces of imagery in all of the Bible—think of the splendid Negro Spiritual that rearticulates its story of a people’s resurrection for the cotton fields—the prophet follows up the promise of Israel’s dry bones revived in the sight of astonished onlookers by recycling his favorite epistemological clause. This time, though, the knowing is tinged with joy:

Then the nations shall know that I the LORD sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary is among the forevermore.

Ezekiel has not said a lot about restoration. It was perhaps too soon for those kinds of words, urgent as the task of theodicy in the face of impending doom must have seemed to him. When he does get around to it, he speaks in the dialect of covenant, YHWH promising in phrases packed dense by the to-ings and fro-ings of Israel’s companionship with him, to ‘be their God … and they shall be my people.’

With such shared history behind them, one need hardly say more than that to conjur up the most exquisite hope.

The remarkable twist, for this reader, is not the promise per se but rather the reversal of the kind of knowing that shall take place in the light of its eventual fulfillment: the nations shall know that YHWH is about and that he resides once again in Israel.

Ezekiel doubtless lacked the temperament and perhaps the vocation to tease out what that kind of understanding might mean for the nations he mentions. Perhaps he would have thought only darkly of their enlightenment, holding new understanding at a most somber angle.

Other prophets, Isaiah and his interpreters among them, would fill out the picture. For them—spokespersons of ineffable hope—knowledge would be light. Light would become life.