by Ame Matuza
Ezekiel 36:24-28
24I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land.
25I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26A 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. 27I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. 28Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.
I get mixed emotions from this set of verses and my thoughts are all over the place-hence the stream of consciousness. To me, this set of verses tells me that I am promised redemption no matter how far I fall short. My confusion is, when and how many times? I mean, is this gathering at the end of time? Or at the end of our lives, when we go to heaven? If it is symbolic of coming back to the word of God (bring you back into your own land) then do we get mulligans? Because I, for one, will not ever totally get it right. Is the land of our ancestors a perfect land, and were they perfect or was just the land perfect and they fell short and moved out? I am always amazed at the Old Testament vs. New Testament messaging. This is very aggressive and action oriented – and the language is firm and there is always a very firm right and wrong. I don’t like the perception in the language that God is going to force his will on us and that we will do his bidding. It paints God as the ultimate micromanager. The New Testament language is usually more forgiving, kind, loving and thoughtful where God is a delegator of responsibility and his people are in charge of decision making with respect to being faithful. Especially the last verse reminds me that God wants us to do the good that we can, but that we can’t do it alone. We need a kind of rebirth and retooling of ourselves and without forced intervention, we just can’t. (I like thinking that the Spirit moves us to make our own decisions that are right or wrong versus the forced tone.) So, obviously, if God will take each of us out of. our “own nations”, God must recognize us enough that we have been at least “trying” to do his will and then bring us all together for a hard reset. I think we all want it – but that none of us can do it on our own. I can read this as being heaven. I can read this as being baptism or confirmation – or another affirmation of faith that we make at points in our life. I yearn for a heart of flesh. Don’t we all?