Category Archives: Old Testament

Can These Bones Live?

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From left to right: three figures represent Ezekiel being set down by God`s hand among the Dry Bones, hearing God and witnessing the beginning of the resurrection. Over a split mountain, littered with destroyed buildings and body parts, are two additional hands of God.
(Dura Europas Synagogue fresco in the National Museum of Syria, Damascus)

“Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37)

Ezekiel heard the dry bones rattle, saw them come together to form skeletons, saw the sinews and tendons grow and stretch. He saw the flesh that spread to cover them. And then he prophesied to the wind and called it to come, to fill the lungs of the dead. He saw the dead raised, the People of God restored, reconstituted, made whole. More than simple resuscitation—which only delayed death—he saw the dead resurrected. If they were resurrected, never to die again, that meant that Death itself was dead.

St. Ambrose of Milan—and most contemporary Biblical scholars as well, but my money is always with St. Ambrose—understood Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones (which occurred around 600 BC, just after the People of Israel had been taken to Babylon in exile) to mean two things: one, that Israel would be restored to their homeland. All the people who felt lost, hopeless would be revived and brought home, to where they belonged. It was a promise to the People as a whole, that although they were as good as dead in Babylon, God would eventually –on his own timetable—bring them home and give them life again in the Promised Land.

Secondly, the resurrection of the dry bones, says St. Ambrose, is also about the Resurrection of us all—each and every one of us—that will occur at the End of Days. (Many Jewish teachers had also come to understand the dry bones in this way, about 100 years before Christ.) Israel restored and the human race raised. Not resuscitated. Resurrected.

And we do not have to wait for the End of Days to experience resurrection and come home. Because Death is already dead and is already losing its power. The dead are being raised every day. “But Death is not dead yet and the dead are not being raised every day,” reasonable people pointed out to St. Ambrose. But death is dead. Just as a farmer catches a chicken and cuts off its head, only to have the corpse get up and run around the farmyard, spouting blood and making a mess and scaring the kids before it finally collapses, Christ cut the head off Death when he who is Life itself died. Death—like that chicken—can still run around and make a mess and scare people but it is already dead and it will finally collapse altogether—just like that already dead chicken—when Christ comes again in glory.

How do we experience Resurrection in advance? The dead are raised and come home every time someone is baptized. The dead are raised and come home every time we approach the altar to receive the Body of Christ—bread as dead and dry as those bones Ezekiel saw but which becomes the living and life-giving Body of Christ. The dead are raised and come home every time we actively disconnect from the things and behaviors which we use to hide from God and ourselves and our neighbors, the things and behaviors that tie us down to the fallen aspect of the world.

To live in Babylon is to live in the cemetery which is the fallen world and Jesus famously healed the possessed and destitute who lived in the cemeteries. But using Ezekiel’s voice, God promises Israel that he would deliver them from Babylon and bring them into the Promised Land; in Psalm 116, we sing, “I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.” We understand the land of the living is the Promised Land. The living. Those raised from the dead. In a famous Byzantine church mosaic, we see Christ Himself identified as “the land of the living.” Because the land of the living is Christ himself, we see the land of the living anywhere Christ is—Heaven. The Church.

“Heaven” in the Apocalypse

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A 13th century Cluniac ivory carving of Christ in Majesty surrounded by the four living creatures. The four living creatures, each having six wings, were full of eyes around and within. And they do not rest day or night, saying:
“Holy, holy, holy,
Lord God Almighty,
Who was and is and is to come!”
The four living creatures reflect a combination of the cherubim in Ezekiel 1 and seraphim in Isaiah 6:2, they function as ‘the priests of heavenly temple’. Their song is an adaption of Isaiah 6:3.

“After this I looked, and lo, in heaven an open door!” (Apocalypse 4)

The vision of the heavenly throne room opens Chapter 4 of the Apocalypse; it is an interlude between the first two series-of-sevens of the book, the seven letters to the churches and the seven seals. (The series-of-sevens are the basic building block of the Apocalypse. Each series-of-seven tells the story of the Church’s journey through history from a different perspective or from another point of view. Each series becomes more intense but the Apocalypse does not tell a linear, sequential story; rather, it is a re-examination of the same story several times.)

The seer of the Apocalypse sees an open door in heaven. Most of us think of heaven as the eternal abode of God, the place of light and glory where the saints and angels stand before the Holy Trinity. We think that only Good exists in heaven. But that does not match the description of “heaven” in the Apocalypse.

Heaven, in the Apocalypse, is not eternal. It will be destroyed: “heaven and earth shall pass away,” we famously read. Heaven will cease. The eternal residence of God, we are told, is the New Jerusalem that will come down from out of heaven (chapter 21). There will be a new heaven and a new earth. Heaven, as it is currently constituted, will be replaced after the End of Days.

The “good” are not the sole residents of heaven. Evil dwells there with God. Spiritual realities and beings populate heaven–we meet the dragon and the rebel angels and the the beast with seven heads and ten horns, not just the four living creatures and the saints.

Rather than consider “heaven” as the equivalent of the Kingdom of God, we would do better to see heaven in the Apocalypse as the equivalent to “spiritual-invisible world.” It is this invisible world that we glimpse from a variety of angles in the different series-of-sevens that make up the Apocalypse. Each series-of-seven is true but it is not literal (as we understand that word in contemporary English).

I will be giving a talk on the Apocalypse this evening, Monday March 15 at 7 p.m. (New York City time) as part of the adult education series at St. Luke’s in the Fields. Join us here. A recording of the talk will also be available afterwards; the link will be posted on the Bible Study tab of this website.

Jezebel and the Nicolaitans

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Israel’s most accursed queen carefully fixes a pink rose in her red locks in John Byam Liston Shaw’s “Jezebel” from 1896. Jezebel’s reputation as the most dangerous seductress in the Bible stems from her final appearance: her husband King Ahab is dead; her son has been murdered by Jehu. As Jehu’s chariot races toward the palace to kill Jezebel, she “painted her eyes with kohl and dressed her hair, and she looked out of the window” (2 Kings 9:30). Image: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, UK/Bridgeman Art Library.

“Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet.” (Apocalypse 2:20)

There is a woman in Thyatira who is a rival of St. John the Apostle. She teaches a group known as the Nicolaitans. She–and her followers–reject the authority of the St. John and disobey his teaching. He compares her to the Old Testament queen, Jezebel.

Jezebel appears in the Old Testament (2 Kings). She is the archenemy of the prophet Elijah. She teaches the people to commit adultery and practice sorcery. Tyconius–the first Biblical scholar to write a commentary on the Apocalypse–says that the figure of Jezebel in the Apocalypse “stands for the whole fallen order.” She is everything that stands in opposition to God. Always and everywhere, whatever opposes God is “Jezebel.” Tyconius also says that her followers, her “children,” can be seen as Goliath, who refused to admit the truth: that Israel’s God is the true God and that David was the one chosen by God to protect the people. Jezebel’s followers refuse to admit the truth: that the Apostle John is the authentic teacher chosen by God and serves as the protector of the Christian communities, as David was in the Old Testament.)

The woman in Thyatira that St. John was concerned was an “antinomian.” (That’s a fancy word that means “against the rules.” Antinomian groups always object to having to follow any rules.) She taught her followers that it didn’t matter what they ate or who they slept with or if they denied Christ when arrested by the Romans and were facing execution. (There was an antinomian faction among the Christians in Corinth, as well–people thought it didn’t matter what they ate or who they slept with.)

“Jezebel” in Thyatira told her followers to just blend in with mainstream society. St. John did not want the Christians to assimilate at all with the society in which they lived. “How much assimilation is acceptable?” was a difficult question that different Christian teachers answered in different ways in different places at different times.