Home
Contents

By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver

©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission

Copyright Policy

Ezekie1 2: 1 – 3: 3

This is how the season of Lent is described in an early United Church service book:

During these weeks the church enters with her Lord deeper and deeper into the shadows of human sin and sorrow, that she may know the fellowship of his suffering.

In this Lenten book all the readings and reflections are intended to help us do just that.

The description is not based on the assumption that the purpose of Lent is to make us all miserable. "Forty days" of imposed deprivation are not being proposed as good for you, in line with the proposition that it's not medicine unless it tastes bad.

The invitation to get to know the fellowship of Christ's suffering is an invitation to get to know the power of God. One can find redemptive fellowship by entering the shadows of human sin and sorrow, but that is to be distinguished from doing oneself good by punishing oneself. There is a mystery here. But it is a mystery that calls for study. We are several times warned in the Bible that God's wisdom will look like foolishness. (However, everything that looks foolish is not God's wisdom!)

What this book proposes is that we reflect each day through Lent on a different passage of scripture that deals with this theme of Christ's suffering. The first 12 readings are taken from the Hebrew scriptures. In every case the author is a person who preached and wrote during the sack of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon which followed it. The theologians of this period made a remarkable contribution to Israel's understanding of God.

It was as Israel went through its darkest night that some of its preachers received the most enlightening revelations into the nature of God.

Ezekiel is the preacher whose writings we explore first. His style makes him hard to read, but he is very worth getting to know.

Put the passage from chapter two and three alongside Psalm 137, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" By contrast, some of these songs – like Psalm 2 – went on about how the Lord would never let anyone destroy Jerusalem. Now (in Psalm 137), with the holy city destroyed and the people in exile, their tormentors called for them to sing one of their songs.

The destruction of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon were a world-shaking, bitter blow to Israel. This is the context in which Ezekiel felt called to preach.

"Son of Man, I send you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me to this very day. The people are also very impudent and stubborn. 1 send you to them, and you shall say to them, 'Thus says the Lord God.'

"But you son of man, hear what I say to you. Open your mouth and eat what 1 give you...." Behold a written scroll was upheld before me...and there were written upon it words of lamentation and mourning.

And he said to me, "Eat this scroll that I give you." Then I ate it and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.

Israel could sing God’s song in a strange land!

It was through God's servant Ezekiel that the people of Israel learned that their God was as real and as potent in Babylon as in Jerusalem.

Speak Lord
Your Word O God, is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit.

You are the one with whom all life has to do.

Address

our zeal and our sloth,
our rage and our compliance, our righteousness and our bad conscience,
our loving and our grasping, our letting go and our indifference,

All this needs your discerning Word.

It needs sorting out.
It needs putting right.

Fit our hearts to receive your Word.
As you shake the world, grant us eyes to see and minds to recognize what cannot be shaken.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord

Amen