Broken for You
Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 17:22-24
If you’ve taken a look down the hill at the end of our “parking lot,” you’ve no doubt seen a tapestry of plastic tarps neatly laid out and covering nearly the entire hill. The tarps are there to smother the Japanese knotweed that infests the hill, and that if left to grow will once again take over virtually every inch from top to bottom.
I was told that in years past, the church paid to have the knotweed cut down, only to have it grow back just as thick in a matter of months. If we ever want to plant any sort of crop on the hillside for our future community garden, we first have to get rid of the knotweed, which has become an obsession of mine.
If you were to walk down to the base of the hill (I don’t recommend it—the slope is quite steep and the stairs don’t begin until you’re halfway down), you’d find several large knotweed roots that I dug from the ground along the building’s foundation. They’re lying in the sun to dry out, which should drain them of their capacity to regenerate and render them harmless.
I couldn’t help but think of the astounding capacity of Japanese knotweed to regenerate, even from just a small shoot, when I read today’s passage from Ezekiel. Speaking through the prophet, the Lord uses the metaphor of a broken sprig from a cedar, which when planted has the capacity to grow into a mighty tree, to represent the people of Israel who themselves feel broken and cut off as they languish in exile. How is that one broken twig contains within itself the potential to grow into a towering tree in whose branches birds will one day nest? (I know there’s a scientific answer to that question, but I’m more interested in the poetry of it.)
Speaking of poetry, Ezekiel is a book in which the prophet experiences wild, even psychedelic visions, such as the vision recorded in chapter 1 in which Ezekiel is shown four creatures, each with four faces—the face of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. And if that sounds familiar, just take a look at the stained-glass windows at the back of the sanctuary (those four characters represent the four Gospels). But in the passage before us, the vision that the prophet sees could not be more ordinary—just a tiny twig that God will break off from the top of a tree and then plant in the ground.
Despite the ordinary nature of the vision, Ezekiel lived in extraordinary times, tumultuous times. The tiny nation of Judah (the southern kingdom of what was once a united Israel) was caught in the middle of a power struggle between two great empires—Egypt and Babylon. Ezekiel, who was born into a priestly family, served as a priest in the temple in Jerusalem. As the simmering political climate finally boiled over, Babylon invaded Jerusalem and carried off many prominent citizens into exile, including Ezekiel.
It was while he was exile in Babylon that the priest—now cut off from the temple—received God’s call to become a prophet. You heard that correctly. Ezekiel didn’t become a prophet until he was exiled from his home, his people, and the temple where he had served the Lord. In that sense, Ezekiel’s plight was not punishment from God or a random act of fate but rather the means through which God would speak a word of hope to his people.
And the people of Judah would need that word of hope because about ten years after Ezekiel was exiled, Babylon finished what they had started. They wiped Judah off the map, destroying the temple in the process and leading the last king of Judah into exile in chains, but not before killing his sons in front of him. That seemed to be the end of Judah. The City of David lay in ruins. The Promised Land had turned into a wasteland. God’s chosen people were now Babylon’s slaves. Their story had come to an end.
Worse still, everything that the people of Judah had believed about themselves and about God now seemed mistaken. They believed that God had set them apart to be a light to the nations, that God had bound himself to them through a covenant, and that an heir of David would always sit on the throne in Jerusalem. Now all of that lay in dust and ashes. Maybe the gods of Babylon were stronger than the God of Israel. Maybe the people had broken trust with God one too many times. Maybe God had finally abandoned them.
I don’t think that anyone here has suffered the indignity of being forced from their native land by a conquering power and sent off into exile in a foreign land, which isn’t to say that we don’t still experience a kind of exile. It’s just that the form of exile we experience tends to be psychological or spiritual in nature. And that kind of exile is still very real. If you live long enough, and I imagine that most of us here have, it’s also unavoidable.
A marriage that started out full of promise ends in a contentious divorce, or even worse, continues as a marriage in name only, with resentment having long since replaced any trace of love.
A death of a beloved family member or friend whose absence weighs upon us with the full weight of eternity.
A diagnosis that contains the word “inoperable.”
A mailbox that when opened each day contains yet another bill that’s marked “past due.”
Whatever the nature of our exile, it’s tempting to think, as the exiles in Babylon did, that God has abandoned us. Surely if God loved us, we would not feel this isolated, this alone, cut off from all hope.
Enter now, not the priest but the prophet Ezekiel, the man who was uprooted from the temple in Jerusalem and planted in a foreign field—planted so that the word of the Lord would be heard at a time and in a place such as this. Through Ezekiel the word of the Lord—a word of hope, a word of promise, a word of truth—will echo in Babylon.
“Thus says the Lord GOD: ‘I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.’ ”
Did you notice all those “I’s”? “I will take a sprig.” “I will set it out.” “I will break off a tender one.” “I myself will plant it.” I, I, I, I! This is not the depiction of a God who is passive in the face of suffering or who waits for the people to return to him with sufficient remorse. God will come to them right where they are. God’s word will resound amid the isolation and desolation of exile.
God will not wait for the people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. God will take the initiative. God will break off a tender sprig—small, delicate, and insignificant but containing within itself the potential for abundance. Through this act of breaking and tearing off, God will cause new life to grow.
I don’t find it that much of a stretch to suggest that this metaphor of a broken sprig from a cedar foreshadows the wooden cross on which Jesus was crucified and from which we receive eternal life. For it was the breaking of Jesus’ body that has produced for us new and everlasting life.
Growing up in the Roman Catholic church, I can remember that during the Communion liturgy the priest would hold up the wafer and cite the words of institution from 1 Corinthians: “This is my body, which is broken for you” (1 Cor. 11:24). As he said them, he would break the wafer in two. That crack of the wafer reinforced the theology that underlay the sacrament. (Not to worry, our Presbyterian way of sharing a loaf of bread along with the phrase “given for you” rather than “broken” has its own theological resonance.)
And no matter how we take the sacrament, the truth remains that Christ is broken for us. And a Savior who is willing to be broken—who is willing to endure the injustice of false accusation, the resentment of the religious leaders, the desertion of his closest friends and followers, the mockery of the soldiers, the scorn of the crowds, and the utter horror of crucifixion—thoroughly understands our own brokenness. That’s how we know that the places in our lives where we experience brokenness are the very places in which God is actively at work, bringing low the high tree and making high the low tree, drying up the green tree and making the dry tree flourish.