Hearts of Flesh

 

“Hearts of Flesh”
Great Vigil of Easter C
30 March 2013 8:00 p.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:24-28)

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

The Great Vigil of Easter is by any figuring a long service, and homilists are well advised to keep their remarks short on this most rich of liturgical nights.  With all the texts we read during the Vigil itself, plus the scriptures we use as lessons during the Vigil Eucharist, you have a wide selection of texts to preach, and given the gravity and depth of the themes of creation, covenant, liberation, death and resurrection, there is no shortage of worthy themes. 

Tonight I want to say a couple of things about the reading from Ezekiel 36, since it is one of my favorite texts of the Bible, but occurs in the Lectionary only here, during the Easter Vigil.  

Ezekiel speaks at a time when the Kingdom of David and Solomon, which God had covenanted to support and sustain, was a thing of the distant past.  The kingdom itself split into two in an ugly civil war 350 years before; the Northern Kingdom of Israel and its people had been annihilated by the Assyrians 150 years before.  His own homeland, the Southern Kingdom of Judah, had lasted a bit longer, but then in 587 BCE, itself was destroyed by the Babylonian Empire.   They burned the capital city, Jerusalem, and leveled to its foundation the Temple of the Jews’ God, Yahweh, a symbol for them of the obstinate, uncompromising national religion that had in some ways been the driving force in the rebellion of the district.  No stone was left standing on another stone.   The entire ruling class of the country—those who escaped being massacred outright or sold into slavery—were transported en masse into exile in Mespotamia to prevent further political mischief in the new named “province” of Judah. 

This was a disaster of overwhelming and unfathomable proportions.  The Jews had believed that Yahweh had promised to protect his people them and keep them from harm.  He had promised, they thought, to protect and preserve the line of the kings descended from David and protect their rule.  Now all that was gone. 

The Jewish way of worship had ceased; the Temple was a mere memory.  Almost all families had lost members, if not been wiped out entirely.  They had tried to keep God’s commandments, and in the very doing of this had provoked the wrath of the Babylonians.  Judah had ceased to exist. 

It is hard for us to understand how hopeless and desperate this situation was.   The nation simply didn’t exist any more.  God had broken the covenant with his people.  Indeed, they were no more his people, no more even a people.  And he was no more their God.  How could one understand these events any other way?  Maybe they hadn’t kept the commandments well enough.  

It was easy enough to blame the disaster on a failure to love God enough, and see in it God’s punishment.  The Book of the Law, after all, had said,

 

“When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come on you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back.  He will bring you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors.  The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. (Deuteronomy 30:1-6)

Just before the Babylonian conquest, the prophet Jeremiah had prophesied of a renewal after the disaster,

“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33).

Among the exiles, Ezekiel reflected on the national disaster.  He realized that the problem was far more complex than simply Deuteronomy’s description of the great cycle of God’s people not living up to God’s intention, God as a result sending disaster, disaster as a result stirring the people to repentance, and God as a result God saving and restoring, with renewed prosperity and blessing.  The problem was far deeper for Ezekiel.  The problem was the human heart itself.  Where Deuteronomy thought that as a result of repentance, God would make kosher the hearts of his people because they have repented, and where Jeremiah said that God would put the law in their hearts and minds, Ezekiel says that God will sprinkle them with water to purify them, but then give them new hearts entirely. 

This is placed within an “envelope” of repeated texts (Ezekiel 36:22 and 32) that say that this is not the result of repentance on the part of the people: “It is not for your sake, O House of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name.”    It is God’s honor, it is God’s nature, it is God’s love that drives God to this new act of creation, not a reward for us pathetically trying to change our pathetic ways. 

The problem for Ezekiel is this:  when we are alienated from God, we are also alienated from ourselves.   He says, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you.”  Importantly, the words in Hebrew for “body” and “flesh” here are the same:  “I will remove from your flesh the heart of stone that is there, and put in its stead a heart of flesh.”   

In this passage, Ezekiel is saying that God will act, out of the love that is God and for no other reason, to reconcile us with ourselves, to heal us, to make us fulfill the fullness of our creation, with a heart that corresponds to our intended nature. 

You who have heard many of my homilies know that I regularly start them with a short prayer drawn from this passage:  Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  I chose this prayer to begin my homilies when I was ordained.  It is a prayer that we be human, simply human.  It is a prayer that we be compassionate, and wholly integrated, as God intends. 

Some are startled that I would be praying for a heart of flesh, since some consider the “flesh” to be a way of talking about something unworthy, about our animal natures.  But this is not so.  Flesh as God intended it is a good thing, very good indeed.   

The problem is our heart that is not flesh:  our heart that is hardened to feeling, to compassion, to vulnerability, to pain.  The problem is humanity that is alienated from itself and its true nature. 

There are two longer forms of the prayer. 

This is from St. Ambrose of Milan: 

O Lord, you have mercy upon all.

 Take away from me my sins,
and mercifully kindle in me

the fire of your Holy Spirit.
Take away from me a heart of stone,
and give me a heart of flesh,
a heart to love and adore you,
a heart to delight in you,
to follow and enjoy you, for Christ's sake, Amen.

This is from Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day:

Dear God, let us not accept that judgment, that this is all we are. 

Enlighten our minds, inflame our hearts with the desire to change—

With the hope and faith that we all can change.

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

St. Paul recognizes that alienation is one of the basic human problems:  that is why, among all the images he uses to describe what Christ did for us on the cross and by being raised from the dead, reconciliation and new creation. He describes at one point people he had ministered to as “a letter,” “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in tables that are hearts of flesh written by God” (2 Corinthians 3:3). 

One of the reasons we talk about an empty tomb when we tell the stories of Christ’s great victory over death and human failure is this:  when Jesus came back from the grave, he was more alive than he had ever been, not less alive.  And that means full integration of spirit and flesh.  That means body; that means flesh. 

Ezekiel’s insight into human alienation, of our heart of stone in our body of flesh, is deeply imbedded in our Christian view of salvation, hope, and victory in Christ’s being raised from the dead.  We find our hope and reconciliation with ourselves and each other in Christ raised from pain, horror, and death.  And in Him we will live and be raised as well. 

Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ,  Amen.