Where is hope in a valley of dry bones?

Many centuries before Christ, the great empire of Babylon laid siege to the city of Jerusalem. The Jewish people, believing themselves to be the chosen people of God, those for whom the throne of David would last forever, find themselves caught up in by inescapable tragedy. This time deliverance does not come, the miraculous escape does not eventuate; the city is destroyed and the people are carried off into bondage.  Death had come for them, literally and symbolically. All hope was lost. 

It was in this place of exile that the prophet Ezekiel speaks vividly of their reality. He sees a vision of a valley filled with dried bones, an image that represents their loss of hope and the disintegration of their sense of future. But like many of the ancient prophets, Ezekiel insists that that even when reality itself tells you that there is no hope, hope remains. God is still interested, a future still exists even when we’re unable to see it. You find this kind of reminder in the Hebrew psalmists too, who choose to end many of their great laments and complaints with the insistent phrase, “put your hope in God for I will yet praise Him”. 

And so in the vision of the prophet (Ezekiel 37), God challenges him to prophesy to the bones that they might live. He plays with the symbol of breath, wind and spirit – all captured in the Hebrew word ‘ruach’. A metaphor of life to confront and overcome the metaphor of death. The presence of ruachtells us that in the face of hopelessness, the divine breath can come and remind us that the story does not end here.

In the Christian tradition, this kind of hope culminates in the Christ  who enters also into this place of death and abandonment and offers us hope even there. The spirit who gives life to valley of dry bones, is also present in Christ, and is also present in and through the human experience. It is for this reason that the Apostle Paul can claim that the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives also in us.

We are complicated people; very seldom all one thing or another. And we are embedded in communities that we participate in, and are shaped by. And so the invitation in this Ezekiel text is to ask what needs resurrection, what needs new life, what needs transformation, and to invite an awareness of how the Spirit might meet us in this place. We might ask this of ourselves;  what are the parts of my own life that need this kind of resurrection?  And we might also ask this for our communities and societies too. Where is hope needed, where are new imaginings and alternative possibilities in desperate demand, and how could the Spirit enliven new life-giving ways of being? These questions have never been more important than they are in the time in which we find ourselves. 

This passage in Ezekiel doesn’t ask us to pretend that life isn’t difficult. This is not some kind of naïve optimism that says that if we just say nice things or repeat cliched phrases that we’ll somehow realise that life is wonderful. That’s not the kind of hope we’re talking about here. Instead it’s the kind of hope that says there is always something more going on here. As Martin Luther King Jr once said, ‘’the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”. 

And this kind of hope is not simply “I have hope that it will turn out ok one day”, but because this hope is grounded in a God who is present to us here and now – the Spirit breathing in and out – we can begin to experience a coming alive of hope in the present. And the sense of hope that rises up allows me to participate in changing things too , whether it be to change and transform my own life or to participate in the change and transformation that is needed around me.