Sermon for Lent 5 - Bishop Brian Farran

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Lent 5: Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 137; John 11:1-45.

The images we’ve seen on television of the devastating wars in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine bring poignancy and help us to understand the historical context of today’s Scripture readings: Psalm 137 and Ezekiel’s prophecy of the valley of dry bones. Gaza and now other parts of Middle East countries are littered with tons of  fractured concrete, scattered around like Ezekiel’s dry bones. And we’ve shuddered hearing in our own living rooms the mournful hopeless wailing of millions of displaced people.

The destruction and crisis lying behind today’s readings is the Babylonian Empire’s obliteration of Jerusalem and the transportation of the Royal Judean government into exile and captivity in Babylon itself in 586 BCE. The Babylonian strategy was to sedate  conquered nations by forcing their leaders and those with organisational skills to migrate to Babylon. There they languished in quiescence. We can hear their trauma in the text of Psalm 137, how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

And the stark imagery of Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones could be today’s ruined cities. Again, hatred will be seeded. The world of 586 BCE is eerily upon us. ‍

In that year of 586 BCE two men, Ezekiel and the writer of today’s psalm, both lived in the Jewish ghetto in Babylon. They are exiles. They are settled, kept powerless, deprived of their religious institution. They live alienated from the dominant Babylonian culture encircling them. They are helpless bystanders as the military prowess of their enemy marches on, forging a vast empire through its sheer aggression.

The Jews colonised in Babylon suffered a double devastating impact. They were deprived of their land and their Temple. Their religious practices came to a sudden, abrupt halt. There could be no further sacrifices. Their liturgy ended, for their entire liturgical life had centred on the Temple. ‍

The burning question for those in Exile in Babylon was, how could they still be faithful to God?  Now that they were dispossessed, how could they relate to God since they were living on foreign soil and with no Temple? ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ they lament.  It is into this dilemma that the prophet Ezekiel speaks and recounts his dream of a valley of dry bones.

At the very time the prophet has his dream -a dream of hope and restoration- a poet writes a helpless lament that we know as Psalm 137 ‍

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept:‍

when we remembered Zion (Jerusalem).

The poet ended his lament with brutal, helpless revenge and hatred:

‍ O Babylon, you will be destroyed.
    Happy is the one who pays you back
    for what you have done to us.
 Happy is the one who takes your babies
    and smashes them against the rocks!.[1]

The contrast between the poet and the prophet is the contrast between despair and hope.  Despair can lead to an impotent sense of profound helplessness churning into rage, hatred and revenge.  Indeed, we’ve experienced instances of that condition in violent eruptions in our own society. We’ve had recent outbreaks in Australia, shattering our self-understanding as a model harmonious multicultural society. You too have known instances of long held ancient hatreds breaking out violently.

Ezekiel is not naive. The prophet recognises hope cannot be manufactured as if it were strenuous wishing.  The hope that Ezekiel injected came from beyond the exiles, came from his careful sensitive scrutiny of their own religious tradition.  The seeds of hope were within their already known experience. Yet the majority had not discerned this potential of hope, stuck as they were within their trauma-perspective, and their enervating lamenting. ‍

One of the great Christian social activists of the 1990s in the United States, the Roman Catholic lay woman Dorothy Day, once said ‘hope is a piece of work’.  Her comment makes it clear that hope has to be grounded; it is about radical change, about new ways of seeing; hope is not escapism.  Hope is the spark of the new, the alternative light within dark experienced harsh reality.

Ezekiel’s dream of a reconstituted Israel became a fact.  The return of the exiles to Jerusalem was politically as dramatic as the reconstitution of all those dry bones forming a living being. Israel did live again in Jerusalem and enriched too from its time in exile.

‍What were the enrichments from the Exilic period in Babylon?

Well, the exiles, believing there was no possibility of a return to Israel, began to write down their oral traditions. Scholars believe that this was the period of textual formation of their Scriptures, our Old Testament. In addition, a new form of worship evolved that led to the emergence of the synagogue, a complement to Temple worship. ‍

This rich, fertile religious development occurred in a time of calamity, a time when many, like the poet of Psalm 137, thought that there would not be a return, that lament was the only possible response to their circumstances.

The dreamer (the prophet) on the other hand injected hope based on the capacity of God to radically reverse their circumstances.  Radical reversals thus became part of their religious tradition, and climaxes in the ministry and person of Jesus. Christian hope emerges from the series of radical reversals that characterised the work of Jesus. Radical reversal is an horizon that should never be lost from a Christian’s perspective. ‍

This radical reversal is evidenced in the raising of Lazarus. John’s account of the funeral and the raising of Lazarus emphasise the extent of the radical reversal. Jesus arrives after dawdling for four days since learning Lazarus had died. Some ancient Israelite scribes believed that a person’s life force hovered near the corpse for three days after death, finally departing on the fourth day. After the fourth day, there was nothing of the previous life force around. The point being made by the repeated references to Lazarus being dead for four days is that Lazarus was beyond hope.[2]

Christian faith emerges from radical reversals, chiefly in the resurrection of Jesus. From Ezekiel to Jesus, we learn that radical reversals are part of our faith tradition. These reversals release us from becoming prisoners to despair, whatever might bring on such despair. We are also freed from despair’s corrosion that moulders into helpless hatred. ‍

There are times when everyone looks at their life and sees scattered dry bones – the derelict experiences which we wish hadn’t happened. We can be haunted by these sudden unwanted recollections. But we have options, as we always have. Either we can reach for hope, or we can surrender to despair. The choosing isn’t neat and simple. Often, it’s a struggle, a defiance. We are then in that place where Ezekiel the prophet and the Psalmist-poet were. Either hope or despair. No other options. Choosing hope requires work, as the social activist Dorothy Day knew only too well.

Hope is work because we have to resist succumbing to lament, to complaint, to rage, however subterranean these are in our behaviour. To think hope is to think defiantly that what  has overshadowed us will not define us. Such thinking is strenuous. It requires us to interiorise the radical possibilities that we glean from the ministry of Jesus. Such a radical reversal is the raising of Lazarus. It is a graphic anticipation that death does not define us. This is sealed as certainty by the resurrection of Jesus and his post-resurrection ministry.

Lazarus does later die, as we all will. But what happened to him on that fourth day dramatized radical reversal not as theory but as fact. We can draw from this theological event an horizon of hope that can, if embraced, percolate through all our thinking as the antidote to coagulating despair. It is a decision. It requires us to rehearse almost daily this theological perspective of radical reversal. Then our thinking and therefore our responses will not be determined by what has happened, however terrible, but rather by what is still possible. This is the defiance of hope. ‍

So, Ezekiel would probably say to us: it’s over to you. Listen for the rattling as apparent dry bones, life’s broken bits and pieces, become enfleshed again through our resolve to hope. In the spirit of Ezekiel let’s look around to see what possible enrichments we Christians can find and support in this time of trauma. ‍

[1] Psalm 137: 8 & 9.

[2] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh.1998. Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John. Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, p.199.

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