First Saturday of Lent

Lent is a time to sort out what we know.  It strikes me that these readings pivot on what can be known and what we know in the gospel.  In the Ezekiel passage, the "nations shall know."  they will learn of God by observing the life of Israel.  They shall know, by the exile of Israel, that God is not mocked.  Moreover, they shall know, by the restoration and gathering of Israel, that God is faithful. 

I will admit up front that Ezekiel is one of two of the books [see update] of the Hebrew Scriptures that leave me the coldest.  That might be more my fault than the Prophet's.  But all of that onslaught of the most lurid of violence and consequence has to be used with more caution than I think human beings are going to use on a consistent basis.  For him it was experience of life, for too man of us it is the unreality of cinematographic convention that we are left to interpret it.   And where it isn't used more cautiously than that it gives rise to all kinds of corruption of exactly the kind that Ezekiel identified as the sin of Israel that justified the exile and the destruction of the Temple [Chapters 8-11, if you want to read those, though these days most of that happens on TV, not in a Temple.]*

It is one of the the problems with modern Christians using the old Hebrew Prophets that so often the Modern Christians use them like readers of supermarket tabloids use the predictions made by phony psychics and astrologers to sensationally scare and dupe those so predisposed.   It's only when read in the context they were written to address that they become useful in real life instead of "Christian" publishing and entertainment industry and political hucksterism. 

There is a lot to be learned from the self-confession of the Jewish tradition and the subtle readings of their own experience which the Prophets offered to the world - confessions of guilt along with the hard realistic message about the subtle but real consequences of human evil.  But among some of the Prophets,you have to wade through some mighty hard reading, of divine revelation as interpreted by our mere fellow human beings, especially those of a poetic bent.  

. . . Out of knowledge of God, who scatters and gathers, and knowledge of Jesus, who is crucified and risen,  Paul knows the pastoral secret of living in the world.  He knows that  in a world governed and ordered by God, who supplies every need, the external circumstance of more or less is not definitional for well-being.  What is definitional is the assurance that God's gracious governance pertains to every circumstance of our life.  The consequence of this secret is the awareness (that Paul surely shared) that practical differentiations of plenty and want are only provisional and not definitive for us.  The assurance of all these modes of knowledge is that the generous self-giving graciousness of God outstrips our categories.  It is enough to be in God's hands. 

In the passage, Paul's acceptance of hardship and trials are personal ones, those hardest for us to take, it being generally easier to accept them on behalf of other people, especially those not connected to us.  Which should never, I think, lead us to the kind of peaceful calm that Paul notes his own hunger and want causes him.  I can't claim to be very good at that, but then, I wasn't given the kind of prophetic vision that Paul and Ezekiel report.  I would like to be able to do that about myself - I can't - but I would never want to feel that way about the pain of other creatures, human or otherwise sentient. 

I doubt I'd have thought about that if I hadn't been led by Brueggemann and Lent to look at those texts. I wouldn't have known to think of it, maybe as this plague or the political catastrophe we are embarked on breaks.  Which I am grateful for.  I like Lent.  It can do that for you. 

*  Update:  Reading this for typos, I should mention a lot of it happens at some "Christian" university or "evangelical 'Library' cum gift shop mall hosting a Trump rally (as often seen on TV) as the modern equivalents of the sins of Jerusalem and the Temple Ezekiel railed against. 

Update 2:  I typed too fast this morning because the other book I was thinking of isn't a prophetic book, it is Ecclesiastes which is listed as a book of "wisdom" and which is one of a couple of books I don't think belongs in the Bible.  I really don't get anything from Ecclesiastes except cynical discouragement and an advocacy for something that seems like a high-market form of paganism instead of belief.