Dry Bones, Oh How He Loved
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The hand of Adonai* came upon me, and He took me out by the spirit of Adonai and set me down in the middle of the valley. It was filled with bones. As He led me around among them, I was surprised to see they were very many there on the surface of the valley, and astonished at how extremely dry they were. Then He asked me, “Human, can these bones live?” And I said, “O Lord Adonai, that only You know.” Then He said to me, “Prophesy over these bones. Declare to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the message of Adonai. Thus has the Lord Adonai declared to these bones: Look! I will infuse you with breath, and you will come to life. I will attach sinews to you, cover you with flesh, and overlay you with skin. I will infuse you with breath, then you will come to life. Then you will know that I am Adonai.’” And I prophesied as I had been commanded. While I was prophesying, there was a noise and a clatter! The bones came together, one bone to another(, each to its proper place). I stared in amazement as sinews appeared on them, flesh grew, and skin overlaid them. But there was no breath in them. Then He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath. Prophesy, human! Declare to the breath, ‘Thus has the Lord Adonai declared: Come from the four winds, O breath! Blow into these slain corpses, so they may come to life.’” And I prophesied as He had charged me, and the breath came into them and they lived, and as they stood up on their feet, a very, very great legion. And He said to me, “Human, these bones are all the house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dry and our hope is lost. We have been cut off.’ Therefore, prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord Adonai: I am about to open your graves, and I will bring you up, My people, from your graves and bring you to Israel’s soil. And you shall know that I am Adonai when I open your graves and when I bring you up from your graves, My people. And I will put My breath in you, and you shall live, and I will set you on your soil, and you shall know that I, Adonai, have spoken and have done it,’” says Adonai.
*used in place of the tetragrammaton, otherwise translated as LORD
那會怕有一天只你共我
—BEYOND
In 2017, I lost two grandparents within months of each other. With my 嫲嫲 (paternal grandmother), the news was not unexpected. She had been ill for quite some time, slowly deteriorating in the hospital. Still, as I glanced at the text message from my parents, it was like a gut punch, like all breath had been snatched out of me. Likewise with my 公公 (maternal grandfather), but their deaths being in such close proximity knocked the wind out of me.
Growing up in Canada, my relationship with my grandparents was limited to phone calls, often with my parents insisting that we spend a little bit of time with their parents, which I did—albeit grudgingly. I had quit Chinese school in sixth grade and was horribly self-conscious of my limited Cantonese vocabulary as a child. But the deaths of my great-uncle and great-aunt prompted a crisis in me, and suffice it to say, I moved to Hong Kong shortly after in hopes of learning my family history and spending time with my family there. In my grandparents’ stories, I heard tales of resilience amid the trauma of the war and post-war periods. History came alive for me; it was in my bones. Japanese and Western imperial dreams were followed quickly by the Chinese Civil War and then life under the British—framed by Cold War dynamics, with the transpacific caught between the United States and the Soviet Union with their various ideologies. I learnt about the ’67 Riots as much as I bore witness to the annual march mourning the protests and the subsequent massacre in 1989. In the Mid-levels in Central, I sat with Sun Yat-sen and his peers’ dreams for a different China than the one they knew. But mostly, I mourned that I was only learning all of this as an adult, that I knew far more Western history than my own—and even then, it was knowledge framed and filtered by the West. Well, but my bones knew, and it wasn’t until I was standing in my grandparents’ mausoleum that I knew.
Death is an intimate experience for immigrants, and even more so for those who are exiled; it echoes even in the postmemory of their descendants—postmemory being the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they “remember” from the stories, behaviours, songs, images of the first generation, but echo so strongly they become memories of their own. The Hong Kong that my parents left no longer exists. The Hong Kong my HongKonger friends remember is entirely lost to them. Nostalgia is a condition that the diaspora understands; in my context, this can be seen by how my HongKonger friends tell me that they feel like they’ve travelled to the late 1980s and 1990s in coming here to Toronto. Likewise, it can be heard in my Spotify playlist: I can sing along to the greatest hits of Cantopop from my parents’ era and feel like they are mine. Nostalgia is bittersweet; it may empower those who have suffered the social trauma of emigrating or being exiled to carve out a new future and, in the process, create resilience. Similarly, it may linger as depressive melancholia, a morbid longing to return to what was and, in the process, creating copies of what was in what is. Or something in between.
In reading today’s lectionary text from the First Testament, I am reminded that I do not actually know Ezekiel 37. I mean, everyone knows about the reconstitution and the reanimation of the dry bones because: resurrection, am I right? My Christian formation direct me straight to the resurrection, but the First Testament and the gospel readings from the lectionary today both point toward the graveyard. The LORD sets Ezekiel in the middle of the valley full of bleached bones glistening in the sun and leads him “around among them” (Ezek 37:2). This scene is striking for three reasons. First, the exceedingly high number of bones signifies a major disaster. Second, the bones lie on the surface, denied a proper burial and left for scavengers. Third, Ezekiel is surprised by how dry these bones are, because it means that whoever these people were, they have been dead for a long time.[1] There is no doubt: dead is dead, is dead—Ezekiel is led among the bones to verify. We know from v.11 that these bones are the whole house of Israel, the people of God. But even in this, God’s lingering with Ezekiel among the bones grants me solace, just as Jesus standing, weeping, before the tomb of His friend in our gospel text does as well. God sees and knows death as a reality, and with us, God acknowledges the despair and finality that come with death—social, emotional, and physical. For the people of Judah now living in Babylon, this death is a consequence of covenant violation, an indictment of their lack of care for the poor among them, their worship of other gods, and so on. For those of us from the transpacific, the deaths we experience come about because of imperial dreams and aspirations of empire that are arguably present in Canada’s past and present as well. While propositions of the death of the Protestant church in Canada are likely exaggerated, even still, there must be a recognition of the death-dealing ways that we have brought to others and ourselves. Amid desecrated realities, God is present and near; and also, we must recognise death before we come to resurrection.
Due to my Western Protestant Christian formation, I sometimes mistake God’s resurrection power as my power. This is an easy mistake to make, given that we are told to do things for God. But the power of resurrection lies in God’s agency. Even so, we are not excluded from the resurrection process. God asks Ezekiel, “Human, can these bones live again?” And when Ezekiel responds, “O Lord Adonai, that only You know,” trying to toss the ball back into God’s side of the court, the LORD does not let him off the hook. Ezekiel is invited to participate in the resurrection of these bones, being told to prophesy to them as if they were alive (v. 4: “Prophesy over these bones. Declare to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the message of Adonai.”). Ezekiel’s words hold no power; we are told that the bones reconstitute even while he is prophesying (v.7)—he is merely the messenger. And as in Genesis 2 with the creation of the groundling, the slain corpses are not truly alive until the breath of God is breathed into them. The dead do not rise because they have been reconstructed physically, or because of some internal force, or even because of Ezekiel himself; they rise because the LORD has infused them with breath. They rise because the LORD has not forgotten His people or left them for dead. They rise because He weeps at the entry of the tomb. They rise because of His abounding loyalty and faithful lovingkindness—a love extended over and over again to His unfaithful and wayward people. They rise because even death cannot keep God in the grave.
Friends, our world is full of need and sorrow, risk and struggle, hope and despair. We cannot close our eyes and ears to suffering, but neither can we succumb to hopelessness. So, then, I ask: People of God, can these bones live? And thanks be to God, we can answer with assurance that God is, even now, gathering the dry bones and breathing new life into them, inviting all of us through death and into His life-giving resurrection power. Amen.
1. for the Bible nerds, in the Hebrew wehinneh functions elliptically for wa’er’e[‘] wehinneh, a.k.a., “And I looked and behold.” Cf. Ezekiel’s other visionary journeys: 1:4, 15; 2:9; 8:2, 7, 10; 10:1, 9.
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