The One Year Bible: Prophecy as Performance Art

 This week my reading has been primarily in the book of Ezekiel.  When we think of books of the Bible filled with fantastic beasts, mind-blowing imagery, and mystifying prophecy, we look to Daniel and Revelation.  But Ezekiel holds its own with terrifying descriptions of angels, vivid visions of the Divine coupled with the same prophecies of doom we've come to expect from Jeremiah.

One artist's rendering of Ezekiel's fantastic vision of the cherubim with their four faces (that of a human, a lion, an ox and an eagle) and wings covered in eyes, the wheels (and the wheels within each wheel), and the surface above which sits the throne of God.  After growing up with images of golden haired Ken-doll angels, Ezekiel's eye-popping description  of angels is a bracing reminder that God is bigger, higher, and stranger than we can begin to imagine.

While Jeremiah was holding it down back in Jerusalem, Ezekiel is embedded with exiles in Babylon.  These early arrivals to captivity are, according to both prophets, are the lucky ones.  The unrepentant people of Judah left in Jerusalem are as doomed as doomed can be.

One of the things that really sets Ezekiel apart is the way he delivers his prophecies.  Ezekiel is a performance artist. He shows rather than tells the impending disaster facing Israel. He does crazy things like lie on his left side for over a year and eating food cooked over human feces (Ezekiel 4:4-12).  The human feces was too much for Ezekiel and God relented and allowed him to cook his food over cow poop instead. In Ezekiel 12, the prophet is instructed to publicly pack a bag and pretend he was going on a long journey into exile. He would conclude his little one-act play by digging a hole through a wall with his hands.  

When Ezekiel wasn't putting on performances, he was prophesying through parables.  He tells the story of the useless vine (Ezekiel 15), the two eagles (Ezekiel 17) and somewhat icky parable of the unfaithful wife--a story replete with rather lurid imagery (Ezekiel 16).

I've often said that Ezekiel is my least favorite book in the Bible--I have found it at various times to be confusing, disturbing and boring. But this time around, I'm coming around to Ezekiel and his bizarro performance art, perplexing parables, and surreal visions.