Troubled Lent focus

Ezekiel begins with a vision of God surrounded by fire and brightness, cloud and winged creatures (with the detail that their faces were those of eagle, lion, ox, and human face).  It isn’t actually a passage set in our three year cycle of Sunday readings. 

The vision isn’t created somewhere like the Temple in Jerusalem.  Exactly the opposite: the Babylonians have destroyed much of the city, levelled the Temple, and engage in pagan worship on the site; Ezekiel is with those exiled (literally by a river in Babylon remembering Zion).

Six centuries later, early in the Revelation of John, there is a vision of God surrounded by fire and rainbow, thunder and winged creatures (with the same four faces, John clearly knowing how he stood in the tradition of Ezekiel).  We read it two Sundays ago.

Again, the vision isn’t created at the holy centre.  The Babylonia empire is long gone; it is the Roman empire now which has been complicit in the execution of Jesus and which has, within John’s recent memory, again destroyed the Temple which has been rebuilt after the Babylonian exile.  John’s exile is on an island, much as Napoleon would be exiled to Elba and Mandela imprisoned on Robben Island.

So major empires come and go, and they take the opportunity to overrun their neighbours viciously and destructively when they have a mind to do so.  And sometimes (it isn’t guaranteed, and it isn’t a neat pious pay off) it is the vision of God which the prophet finds pulls into focus as he or she sits in the middle of the consequences of the disaster.

And then last Sunday, the Church of England has taken to invite us to relate to the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent.  At one level this seems a puzzling, or at least non-obvious, choice.  But, once again I notice the glory isn’t the real focus of the story.  We are (Luke’s version this year) reminded that it is a week on from Jesus’ saying he must suffer and his followers must take up their cross every day, and the dialogue Jesus has with Moses and Elijah is about his coming ‘exodus’ or death.

Perhaps the glory and the painful realities are always inextricably linked.  ‘It all seemed so nice, but my faith was destroyed when evil came to wreck things’ is as useful as ‘it is all horrid, but there will be pie in the sky when we die’.  Our Lent and our world news seriously inviting us to stay close to the apparent impossibility of reconciling the two.  

Meanwhile, the picture comes not from one or two but three weeks ago.  Jeremiah, another prophet of the impending and breaking Babylonian invasion, in common with the Psalmist, has curses for those who trust mere mortals and our own strength, destined to be like a shrivelled shrubs in the desert, and blessing for those who trust in the vision of God, destined to be fruitful from roots stretched out beneath the rare streams which flow there.  At St James’, our Family Service found water flowing though the desert and placed prayers for green possibilities on its banks.