NOTES for Eze 4:1-17
The prophets of the Old Testament sometimes did strange things that shocked their contemporaries. Such prophetic actions can be compared with the parables spoken by the Lord Jesus Christ, but the prophets' parables were visible. In some ways, they resemble the actions of holy fools.
Thus, in chapter 4, the prophet Ezekiel tells of a prophetic action God commanded him to perform in order to say something important about the coming destruction of Jerusalem. To us today, the language of this ‘pantomime’ parable is difficult to understand. It was probably no clearer to the prophet's contemporaries without explanation. Yet the meaning of the revelation is sufficiently clear.
The Lord speaks of the measure of Israel's lawless deeds, to which the duration of the people's captivity corresponds in some mysterious way. The main part of the prophetic action concerns this: instead of the immeasurable gifts of God's mercy, Israel, which has turned away from its Creator, will receive unclean food in very scant measure in captivity. The method of baking flatbreads used at the time caused them to absorb smoke from the fuel on which they were baked. God commands the prophet to bake these flatbreads over excrement, because they symbolise the bread of slavery, bitter and foul.
There are two more important aspects to this parable. In the context of what Ezekiel will say about people's responsibility for their actions, God tells the prophet, ‘you will bear the iniquity of the house of Israel’, and prescribes a very painful way for him to do so. Thus the prophet, even before the revelation of the New Covenant, becomes an image of Christ, who suffered for our iniquities.
We are also struck by the almost childlike way of depicting the siege of Jerusalem: ‘take a brick and draw the city of Jerusalem on it’. A sandpit and toy soldiers immediately come to mind... Yet this expresses the difference in scale between the life of the Creator and His actions in the world, and the people who betray God. This symbol of Jerusalem should be compared with God's dialogue with the prophet Jeremiah about Jerusalem's destruction, which took place five or six years earlier, around 598. After commanding Jeremiah to go to the potter's house, God showed him how the potter crushes a flawed vessel in order to fashion something new from the lump of clay. ‘Can I not do the same with you, house of Israel?’ the Lord asks the prophet (Jer. 18:1–11).
Within the context of the book of the prophet Ezekiel, this little brick representing Jerusalem is set against two measures. On the one hand, there is the vision of the Creator's universal glory and omnipotence described by the prophet in the first chapter—and how small and defenceless the lawless people prove to be before that glory. On the other hand, the prophet sets Jerusalem's insignificance and its ridiculous pride against the mercy of God, of which he will speak in the second half of the book. And this mercy, God's condescension to a pitiful ‘little brick’, is revealed to the prophet as an inexplicable and undeserved gift.