The Life
Ezekiel was a young Jewish priest, twenty-five years old, when he was carried away to Babylon with the second wave of captives in 597 B.C. He never went home. Five years later, by the river Chebar in a foreign land, the heavens opened over him and he saw a vision so strange that he fell on his face. Wheels within wheels, four living creatures, a chariot of fire, and on the throne the likeness of a man surrounded by light. From that day until the end of his life, Ezekiel was a prophet — sent by the Lord to speak to the exiles in Babylon, to tell them why Jerusalem would fall and how it would one day rise again.
Ezekiel had been raised to be a priest in Jerusalem. He grew up around the Temple, learning the Law and the rituals of the sanctuary. Then, in 597 B.C., King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came and took King Jechoniah and the cream of the Jewish nobility into exile. Ezekiel was taken with them. He was twenty-five years old, the age at which a Levite began his apprenticeship in the priesthood, and now there was no Temple to serve in. The dream of his whole life seemed to be over.
Five years into the exile, when Ezekiel was thirty, he was sitting by the river Chebar with the other exiles. Suddenly the heavens opened over him. He saw a great storm-wind out of the north, a vast cloud, and a fire flashing continually. In the middle of the fire he saw four living creatures, each with four faces — a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle — and four wings, and beside each creature a great wheel within a wheel that moved as the creatures moved. Above their heads was a sapphire throne, and on the throne the likeness of a man surrounded by light. Ezekiel fell face-down on the ground. A voice told him to stand up, and the Lord said: I am sending you to the people of Israel.
In one of his visions the Lord set Ezekiel down in the middle of a valley filled with dry, scattered bones. Bones everywhere, bleached white, the remains of an army that had perished long ago. The Lord asked: “Son of man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel answered: “O Lord, you alone know.” Then the Lord told him to prophesy. As Ezekiel spoke, there was a sound, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to bone. Then sinews appeared, then flesh, then skin. They were bodies now — but no breath in them. The Lord told him to prophesy again, this time to the breath, the wind. He did. The breath came into them, and they stood up upon their feet, an exceedingly great army.
Near the end of his book Ezekiel sees a vision of the new Temple. He is led around it, measuring all of its courts and chambers. At one point he comes to the eastern gate of the outer sanctuary. The gate is shut, and the Lord says: “This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it; because the LORD, the God of Israel, hath entered in by it, therefore it shall be shut” (Ezekiel 44:2). Only the Prince — the Messiah — may pass through it. The Fathers of the Church, looking at this prophecy, saw in it a beautiful image of the Mother of God, the gate by which the Lord alone entered the world, who remained a virgin before, during, and after the Incarnation.
Ezekiel was the strangest of the prophets in his way of preaching. He did not only speak. He did things. The Lord told him to lie on his left side for three hundred and ninety days and on his right side for forty days, to bear the iniquity of the houses of Israel and Judah. He told him to make a model of besieged Jerusalem out of clay and to act out the siege. He told him to shave his head and beard, weigh the hair, and burn it in three portions to symbolize the fates of the people. The whole life of Ezekiel became a parable, an enacted prophecy. He preached not only with his voice but with his body.
Tucked into the long oracles of Ezekiel is one of the most beautiful promises in the whole Old Testament. The Lord tells the people that he is going to do something radical: he is going to take their stony hearts out and give them new hearts of flesh, and put his Spirit inside them. This is not religion as ritual obedience. This is the promise of the New Covenant, the same one Jeremiah saw, the same one fulfilled at Pentecost when the Spirit descended on the apostles. The new heart, the heart of flesh, is the heart of every Christian who has been baptized into Christ.
Ezekiel never returned to Jerusalem. He prophesied to the exiles in Babylon for over twenty years, and finally, according to the tradition of the Church, he was killed by a Hebrew prince whom he had rebuked for idolatry. He was bound to wild horses and torn apart. The Jewish exiles gathered up his torn body and buried him in a field called Maur, in the tomb of Shem and Arphaxad, the forefathers of Abraham, not far from where Baghdad would later be. He was a martyr after a lifetime of speaking the truth.
Ezekiel matters to every Orthodox Christian because his images have entered our worship and our hearts. The four living creatures around the throne become the four Evangelists in every Orthodox church. The dry bones coming back to life are read every Holy Saturday at the Vespers of the Resurrection. The closed gate that the Lord alone has entered is read at every great feast of the Theotokos. The new heart of flesh, the Spirit poured out, the river flowing from the Temple — all these images shape the way Christians have prayed and seen the world for two thousand years. Ezekiel is the friend of every soul that has been carried far from home, lost what it most loved, and yet seen the heavens opened over it.