Katharine Hepburn, who co-starred with Cary Grant in four different Hollywood movies in the 1930s and 40s, described her friend as “a personality functioning,” suggesting, as a distinct admirer of it, that Grant’s unique onscreen persona—one of singular sophistication, wit, and charm—was a kind of work of art in and of itself.
Grant didn't just take on parts in movies, he functioned as a particular elegantly-constructed, exquisitely-crafted presence called Cary Grant in each role he played, the very one we think of whenever we think of Cary Grant. It was in the accent, the posture, the clothes, the grace of movement. It was in everything. His performances were curated through and through to produce the effect of being Cary Grant.
There’s something like this going on in the book of Ezekiel. In his time, the prophet Ezekiel was a personality functioning. For two decades, everything he said and everything he acted out in such dramatic fashion conveyed a single message, but it wasn’t one of elegance and sophistication. It concerned God’s judgment. Ezekiel himself was God’s message. Everything he did created the effect of being Ezekiel.
Ezekiel was a POW, one of thousands taken from Judah to Babylon in 597 BC. In exile there, Ezekiel’s ministry focused on telling his fellow refugees it was their own sins that had brought them there and that more judgment was coming back in Jerusalem.
The book is full of famous visions. Every time you turn the page, Ezekiel is being caught up in the sky and transported hither and yon. There’s the famous wheel within a wheel vision in the first chapter. Four fierce angels, each with four wings and four faces, then visit him. Ezekiel is next told to eat a scroll. He’s committed. He does it. Then comes a series of visionary public performances starring, you guessed it, Ezekiel. The first is a kind of art installation. Ezekiel uses a clay tablet to create a 3D model of Jerusalem, with siege works, ramparts, and an iron pan that blocks any means of escape from the city. Jerusalem, he was showing his audience, would soon fall.
Ezekiel then physically acts out the duration of the coming tribulation by lying down in a certain posture on his side for a certain amount of time. He communicates that starvation is coming to Jerusalem by baking bread on a dung heap each day but only a very little bread. As he demonstrates the scarcity ahead, he instructs his audience on the terrors of the coming siege.
Next, he takes a sharp sword and shaves his head and beard, dividing the hair into thirds, burning some, dramatically striking some with his sword, and scattering some more in the wind before placing a small fragment in the folds of his garment, again acting out publicly the fate of Jerusalem’s people. A third would perish in the city, a third would be killed in battle, and a third scattered. Only a remnant would survive.
He then acts out yet another warning by trembling as he eats, warning the people that soon they “will eat their food with anxiety and drink their water in despair...”
Next, Ezekiel preaches stunning sermons with vivid parables about Judah and Israel’s faithlessness, calling up a sequence of memorable images for his listeners: a fruitless vine, an adulterous woman, a forest fire, a smelting furnace, two wayward sisters, a boiling pot. Even the death of Ezekiel‘s wife becomes a prophetic sign of the silent mourning approaching. Ezekiel, a personality functioning, is himself God’s sign of coming judgment.
However, in the end there’s a final message, or perhaps just an extension of the first, and it’s this: After judgment, rebirth will follow. If you don’t remember the text of the prophecy, you’ll surely recall the song:
Dem bones Dem bones Dem dry bones
Dem bones Dem bones Dem dry bones
Dem bones Dem bones Dem dry bones,
Hear the word of the Lord.
It’s from Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones.
The hand of the Lord was on me, and He brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones...Then He said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.
Ezekiel is God’s vision come to life. He’s an exquisitely-curated personality functioning, a message that tells us what follows tribulation under a faithful God is always restoration.
God, thank you for this dramatic display of our destiny under Your grace. Amen.
