The field is stretched out below us, a wide and open plane between two mountains. We soar over the field in the early morning as the sun is burning orange and red in the east. Swooping low we see, gathered at either side of the valley, two opposing armies gathered for war. They are shouting at each other, screaming their taunts and cursing their foes. They roar like fierce and hungry lions in anticipation of the battle.
Suddenly a trumpet blast echoes across the field and the armies charge like rushing waves toward each other. The sound they make is that of an earthquake or thunder. It’s only seconds, but it feels like years before they collide in the center of the field with the sound of a hundred hammers on a hundred anvils, sword upon shield. The crash is catastrophic. Blood flies and horses shriek in terror.
We continue circling overhead, watching as the battle is fought below us. The forces ebb and flow like tidal waves, surging first this way and now that, back and forth until, finally, one army presses their advantage and the ranks of their enemies collapse beneath them. They turn and attempt to flee the battlefield but they are cut down as they run. In a few short hours this battle has been fought and thousands lie dead and dying under the sun. Already the stench of death hangs in the air. We are joined in our circling by vultures and ravens and crows, waiting for a feast of carrion.
Imagine it. See it in your mind, behind your eyes.
A few days pass and the corpses remain in the field, swollen and bloated by the expanding gasses trapped within them. Scavengers have been at work, pulling the flesh and muscle from the dead. The crows and ravens and vultures are joined by jackals and wolves, and hyenas. They snap and snarl at each other as they pick at the bones. Here one drags his meal away from others who would take it from him.
Imagine it.
Now weeks have passed, with days of sun and wind and rain. The flesh is gone
Months pass, now years. This field of the dead is silent. Nothing moves. Nothing breathes. All that remains are the scattered bones, desiccated by the sun blasting heat of the sun.
Imagine it. See it in your mind.
This was – and is - the sort of thing celebrated by victorious kings. They laugh when they see the bodies of their enemies scattered across the field of battle, and they celebrate. King Sennacherib of Assyria, for example wrote this after a battle with his enemies:
I cut them down and defeated them. I cut their throats, and I cut off their precious lives like a string. Like the many waters of a storm, I made their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth. My prancing steeds harnessed for my riding plunged into the streams of their blood as (into) a river. The wheels of my war chariot, which brings the wicked and evil low, were spattered with blood and filth. With the bodies of their warriors I filled the plane like grass.
-from the Annals of Sennacherib
Victorious kings look out over the field of bones and bodies and they laughed, but the defeated can neither weep nor mourn for they are no more.
What does it matter, a dream of love
Or a dream of lies
we’re all going to be the same place when we die
Your spirit don’t leave knowing
your face or your name
and the wind through your bones
Is all that remains
And we’re all going to be
just dirt in the ground.
-“Dirt in the Ground” -Tom Waits
It doesn’t sound like scripture. But then again, maybe it does. Consider the words of Qoheleth, the Teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes:
So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no man knows whether love or hate awaits him. All share a common destiny – the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.
This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all.”
-Ecclesiastes 9: 1 – 2a, 3a
Now imagine again, the prophet Ezekiel is crushed by the heavy hand of God upon him, and then lifted up through the air in a visionary experience and carried out to that battlefield between the mountains – that valley that is more than just the valley of the shadow of death. He’s taken into that valley of death itself.
Now walk with the prophet through this desolate and lonely place. He is pushed and prodded, forced to walk up and down among the bones. He sees how many of them there are. And he sees that they are so very dry. He stumbles now, and looses his footing. He falls forward as the bones underfoot roll and scatter. An empty socketed skull lolls to rest just in front of him. Its eyeless gaze stares at him in silence.
For seven years he’d had only one message – Doom, death and destruction! Doom, death, and destruction! And while he understood that message better than those who heard him (or those who wouldn’t hear him…) I think the reality of that message became clear for him in this experience. He was compelled to walk among the scattered bones of those he said would die. And I don’t want to imagine what that might have felt like for the prophet.
And then a voice from somewhere, nowhere, everywhere speaks to him. “Son of Man, can these dry bones live?”
The prophet searches the field but sees nothing but the scattered dry bones and he answers, “You know, Lord. You know.”
Now this isn’t much of an answer. This is not the confident affirmation of faith that we might have expected. We might have expected the prophet to speak boldly, without pause and without doubt, “Yes, of course, God! With you all things are possible!” Instead, Ezekiel’s diplomatic non-answer betrays something of the prophet’s mind.
He sees the bones. He understands what they mean. This valley of bones is the people of Israel and they are dead. They are cut down and destroyed. They are bereft of life. They breathe no more. There is no hope.
“Son of man, can these dry bones live?”
Along a river of flesh
Can these dry bones live?
Ask king or a beggar
and the answer they’ll give
is we’re all going to be
yea, yeah
we’re all going to be
just dirt in the ground.
“Dirt in the Ground” – Tom Waits
“Son of man, can these dry bones live?”
The prophet sighs “You know, Lord. You know.”
The voice tells him to prophecy over the bones, to speak the word of the Lord. And Ezekiel follows these instructions. He speaks the word of Yahweh over the bones and then he hears a noise – a rattling noise as the bones begin to move. They shake and stir and then begin flying together, reconnecting each one to the proper body, bone upon bone and joint upon socket.
Then the muscles and sinews begin to form, knitting themselves over the bones. And finally flesh appears and covers the bodies. The decomposition of these corpses is reversing itself. But as astounding and amazing as this is, they are still lifeless bodies. They are still corpses. Can these dry bones live?
The voice speaks to the prophet again, instructing him now to prophecy to the wind – to the breath –interchangeable words in the Hebrew language. And again, Ezekiel does as he is instructed. He speaks to the four winds, the north and south and east and west wind which act as God’s messengers, and the wind begin to blow across the plane. The breath of God begins to blow across the plane.
Remembering that story of creation from the book of Genesis, the Man was formed in a dry and desolate place, sculpted from the dry red clay of the ground. But there was no life in the Man until God breathed the breath of life into his nostrils.
Those dead and desiccated bones now stood as the living, breathing army of God – an army of life. “This is what I’m going to do,” the Lord tells Ezekiel. “I’m going to bring you up out of your graves.” He promises the restoration of his people. But in giving this vivid visionary experience to the prophet, the Lord is showing something of his greater, larger plan.
It is, as he told the prophet, the promise of restoration. Like the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel described the return of the people of Israel from their captivity in Babylon. But this valley of dry bones resurrection is the beginning of new idea.
In the Old Testament world, dead was dead. There wasn’t much of a concept of an afterlife, as we know it. There wasn’t a concept of a reward in heaven or punishment in hell. A good life was its own reward and dead was dead. But Ezekiel is given a small glimpse of something more.
It’s curious that this vivid picture of a resurrection isn’t quoted in the New Testament where resurrection becomes a central idea, but there is a slight echo of Ezekiel’s experience in the valley of dry bones. Matthew’s gospel tells us that at the moment Jesus died on that cross outside the city of Jerusalem, there was a shaking and a rattling and the graves of many righteous men were opened, and that these dead men were seen walking through the city. They were resurrected in Jesus’ death.
We are currently in the season of Lent, a time when Christians the world over prepare themselves for the coming events of Holy Week and for Resurrection Sunday. As we move with Jesus towards the city of Jerusalem and towards the crucifixion and the resurrection, I suggest that we carry this question with us.
“Son of man, can these dry bones live?”
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