Monday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Indiana corn near the Wabash River

Such was the vision of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.

Our Roman Lectionary now introduces the most difficult of the Major Prophets. Ezekiel’s visions are bizarre and hard to interpret. At one time I complained of his verbosity; it seemed like he overstated everything. After 36 years of preaching, I admire his brevity! Perhaps I’ve become prolix in the meanwhile!

Occasionally some bright-eyed journalists, who tend to be knowledgeable in all fields and masters of none, think Ezekiel must have been schizophrenic. How could anyone see such visions and be normal?

But Ezekiel never speaks with the assumed authority of the insane. He cannot give an exact description of his vision. In today’s reading he couches every descriptive phrase in words like likeness, something like, appearance, and resembled.

What he sees, of course, is the glory of God who has not abandoned his people, even when they have been forcibly marched from Jerusalem to Babylon. In those days most people believed that gods controlled various regions of the earth. When you relocated to a foreign country you encountered the worship of foreign gods and you probably obeyed the maxim, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Under the circumstances reasonable Jews might suppose their God had been defeated by the Babylonian deities. What else could explain their miserable plight?

But Ezekiel’s vision revealed their God reigning with as much authority over the River Chebar in Babylon as he had ruled in the Temple of Jerusalem.

The message is clear, “God is still in charge!”

Make no mistake about that. Our God has a throne which spans the earth; he has the wings of an eagle and the wheels of a chariot and there are no boundaries to his authority.

Forty years after the book Culture Shock appeared, we may still wonder if God is moving with us into the future. If our religion and its bishops sometimes seem clueless is our God?

Ezekiel knows our plight; he has been there; we stand ready for his teaching.  


For a good introduction to the Book of Ezekiel, go to the Bishop's web site.