NOTES for Eze 8:1-10:22
Beginning with chapter 8, the prophet Ezekiel describes the content of his second vision and the Lord’s words spoken within it. Unlike the first, given to Ezekiel on the bank of the Chebar, the second vision occurred in an assembly of the faithful—a foreshadowing of the synagogue—in the prophet’s house. The second vision is a kind of insight, an illumination that comes upon the prophet’s mind by the will of the Holy Spirit. God places the prophet at a new vantage point and shows him what he already knows but does not fully realise. Compared with the first vision, the second can be classed as a type much more widespread in the Church. Here God does not so much tell someone something new as open their eyes to a reality they already know. We cannot say that God gives the prophet His own viewpoint; rather, He grants him a certain detachment that enables him to see life anew.
The prophet describes his subjective experiences as ‘God brought me... and I saw...’. Thus the Lord shows Ezekiel all Jerusalem’s lawlessness. Whereas previously the subject was the cruelty and violence that had permeated the people’s life, God now draws the prophet’s attention to direct manifestations of Israel’s idolatry. Not just anywhere, but within the Temple itself, the prophet sees worship of the most popular idols of the ancient East. Here is the statue of Astarte, probably erected half a century earlier under King Manasseh; her cult was widespread throughout the Near East and was highly indecent in character. Here is ‘weeping for Tammuz’, the veneration of the eastern peoples’ dying and rising agricultural god, and worship of the sun and every kind of creature, characteristic of Egypt and Babylonia, the countries Israel strives so hard to surpass... All this was known both to the prophet and to the elders of Judah gathered in his house. But in the vision God calls things by their names, and the picture of Israel’s complete apostasy becomes frighteningly obvious.
The conclusion about what will happen to the people who have betrayed God for idols suggests itself. The prophet depicts the consequences of idolatry in chapter 9, and his words recall with exceptional force the plagues of Egypt that fell upon Pharaoh as he resisted God. The marking of the innocent, those ‘grieving over Israel’s abominations’, vividly recalls the night of the Exodus. But now Israel itself stands as God’s opponent, doomed to destruction: ‘You alone have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities,’ as God said to the prophet Amos almost two hundred years before Ezekiel (Am 3:2). To the prophet Ezekiel himself it seems that all Israel is destined to perish, and he cries out to God in trembling: ‘Will You really destroy everyone?’
Answering Ezekiel, the Lord again speaks of lawlessness and violence. Idolatry recedes into the background, and God says, ‘This land is full of blood, and the city full of injustice... I will bring their conduct upon their own heads.’ We cannot fail to see that this is the fate of all societies in which violence becomes the defining feature of people’s lives. Moreover, God clearly has in mind not so much state violence as ‘everyday’ violence—what we call living by the unwritten code of the criminal world.
But this is not all: God reveals the truth to the prophet to its utmost limit, to the most terrible thing that no Israelite could even have imagined. The Israelites of Old Testament times conceived of God’s presence as His Glory filling the Jerusalem Temple (compare chapter 6 of the book of the prophet Isaiah). This Glory, the Shekhinah or Shekinah, was not simply a radiance emanating from God, but His own presence. The Israelites were certain that as long as God’s Glory remained in the Temple, nothing bad would or could happen to them. This underlies the saying ‘Here is the Temple of the Lord’, denounced by the prophet Jeremiah (Jer 7:4). The very presence of God’s Glory in the Temple was considered unshakeable and unconditional, in accordance with the promise to David and Solomon.
But the Creator’s presence is incompatible with any sin. When people definitively choose sin, the presence of the Glory of the Lord becomes impossible. And the prophet Ezekiel sees that, because of the sins of Israel, which worships idols, breeds lawlessness and treats the Almighty Himself as an idol, God’s Glory will be taken away. The central and most important part of the vision is the description in chapter 10 of how the Glory of the Lord leaves the Temple on a fiery chariot.
The prophet explains that what he has seen cannot be described in human language, and he creates a kind of verbal icon. Hence the strange images of wheels full of eyes, incredible beings moving in all four directions at once, and so on. Perhaps this description, written down in Babylon, was influenced by images the prophet saw there. The essence of chapter 10 is, of course, not these details but the content of the Revelation.
What matters to the prophet is that what he has seen emphasises the universal character of God’s authority and presence—hence the references to the four points of the compass. The immeasurable difference in scale between the Almighty and humanity is revealed to him. Over the centuries since the Exodus, the Israelites had come to treat God as their little national deity of folklore—and now Ezekiel has seen a reflection of the Creator’s true majesty. It is in this perspective that he also sees his people’s moral wretchedness.
The terrible tension running through these chapters is the inexorable logic of what happens. Events unfold before the prophet’s eyes, each following from the one before it, and this chain of cause and effect seems natural in its details and horrifying as a whole. Thus petty but understandable human vileness leads to a catastrophe utterly out of proportion to it. In this respect, the description of Jerusalem’s destruction strongly recalls the Way of the Cross.