Sunday, July 7, 2024

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9, Year B)

Ezekiel 2:1-5; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

The Rev. Clint Brown

What had happened was that the world had been turned upside down. For four hundred years, the people of Israel, huddled together on their little inheritance of land between the mighty empires of the north and that of Egypt to the south, had precariously maintained an independent nation-state. Under David and Solomon, it had reached its greatest extent and had traded, conquered, forged alliances, and seen great building projects and cultural efflorescence. But it was not to last for long. At the death of Solomon, it split into a northern and southern section – two kingdoms, Israel and Judah – each going its own way in dealing with the growing tensions within, but, especially, without. The larger states that surrounded them had recovered and would not continue to leave them unharassed and free to control their own destinies. The end came for the northern kingdom in the year 720 BCE when the Assyrians overran it and made it a vassal. The southern kingdom withstood the onslaught and struggled on, but only for another century and a quarter. When its end came, at the hands of the Babylonians, it came in two waves. The Babylonians first attempted a relatively benign form of control, carrying away only the priestly elite and the nobles into exile, but when that failed to quell rebellion, they let the axe fall. In the year 586 BCE, ten years after the first deportation, the Babylonians returned with their siegeworks, leveled the city of Jerusalem, and deported – this time in their thousands – most of the remaining population. Poor King Zedekiah they blinded, but not before slaughtering his sons before his very eyes. The Davidic line was thus extinguished. Yahweh’s temple was destroyed. The people were uprooted and displaced from the Promised Land. The world had been turned upside down.

Although, as it turned out, the actual captivity and displacement would last for only about 50 years, its impact far exceeded its relatively brief span. For one thing, it initiated the worldwide Jewish Diaspora that has continued, in one form or another, to the present. Out of this diaspora emerged the synagogue system, which can be thought of as a kind of “portable temple,” setting Judaism on its trajectory to becoming the primarily Scripture-based religion with which we are most familiar. And the Bible is uniquely a product of the Exile. Most of the Old Testament came into its final form during this period and the Exile hangs like a pall over it. The Babylonian Exile represented such a psychological wound that the entire Old Testament can be read as a response to it, and, therefore, the shadow of the Exile hangs over the whole Bible. One might say that it is the Bible’s interpretive key.

One of the many directly impacted by the Exile and struggling to understand it was the prophet Ezekiel. He was a priest and had been carried off to Babylon during that first deportation ten years earlier. According to his book, he was relocated to a settlement along the river Chebar, a little south of the city of Babylon, and it was here that he had an incredible vision – both an explanation for what had happened and an expectation of what was to come – and what he and his great contemporary Jeremiah came to understand was that exile may seem to be something imposed from the outside by external forces, but what it really is, ultimately, is a condition of our own making. There is no finger of blame to point when we are in exile except toward ourselves, for we suffer only the consequences of our own actions or inactions. It is a theme running throughout Scripture – individual responsibility – but now it has gained a new prominence and explanatory force. “Hearts of stone” will be replaced by “hearts of flesh” is Ezekiel’s memorable image for the kind of individual transformation he envisions (Ezekiel 36:26-27). And so the most revolutionary of the ideas to come out of the Captivity in Babylon is that our lives are lived in a constant state of exile because of sin. Sin expels us from the Promised Land just as it expelled us from Paradise, and that is why exile is best understood as a condition of our own making. “Hear or refuse to hear” (v. 5), change or refuse to change; this is the choice, then as now, with which Ezekiel presents us today.

A few centuries after Ezekiel, another prophet arose in Israel preaching this selfsame message of responsibility, and one day, while visiting his hometown, he found his own neighbors and kin dismayingly unreceptive. In fact, he found that “he could do no deed of power there” (Mark 6:5). Why was that? Was Jesus incapable? Hardly. Or did he sleep wrong and wake up with his miracle meter not fully charged? Not likely. No, what seems to be happening in this story is that Jesus can do no deed of power, not from want of power, but because, from these people who should have known better, he has received no invitation. Presumably, the people of Nazareth felt that they didn’t need anything, that they were fully capable of helping themselves; and, since there was nothing wrong with them, they had no need of a miracle. I wonder, is that us? Are we grown so sure of ourselves, so self-righteous, so self-centered and self-sufficient that we have become blind to our own need for a savior? This, to my mind, qualifies as being in a state of exile.

But this exile does not have to be a permanent condition because, as we now know, exile is self-imposed, and therefore, self-corrected. God desires our return, like the prodigal. God also desires our invitation. Recall that Ezekiel’s vision ends with restoration. Yahweh does not abandon his people; he leads them in a new Exodus back to the Promised Land. But the way back from exile, for them and for us, must always be through repentance and the steady unmasking of our delusions and the toppling of our false gods. If we all will but seek to uncomplicate and simplify, making fewer demands of others and on our natural resources; if we will displace ourselves as the ruler of our lives and live more trustingly, discovering that we are all in this together, then we will find ourselves coming out of exile. It is just good common sense that the fewer obstacles we place between ourselves and God, the closer God will be and the closer we will be to our true selves. The great American novelist, poet, essayist, activist, and farmer Wendell Berry put it like this: “Take all you have and be poor.” The way out of our exile is simply this: to take all that we have and be poor.