Kyle Dresback

Dear Friends,

If you were throwing a dinner party, the Hebrew prophets are the people you wouldn’t want to show up. But if the Hebrew prophets were throwing a dinner party, I think Ezekiel is the one they wouldn’t want to show up.

The prophets, as a group, are generally the kinds of people that civilized, well-mannered folks tend to go out of their way to avoid. I often wonder if this is the reason Israel had such a hard time receiving their messages. How many of us have perfected the “stare straight ahead” or the “polite smile” at a brisk walk in similar situations?

But even among his eccentric prophetic peers, Ezekiel stands out. He receives some pretty raw, unfiltered heavenly visions unlike any we see elsewhere. Ezekiel 1 reads like a strange dream, inexplicable if you yourself weren’t the dreamer: fire and lightning, four glittering winged beasts flashing through the sky, terrifying spinning wheels within wheels, and something like a throne above it all radiating with God’s fiery glory.

At the end of this vision Ezekiel is told to eat a scroll.

This material is not fit for polite company. It’s hardly intelligible. So how do we read such prophetic visions as Scripture?

It turns out there is a time-honored tradition of not quite knowing how to talk about God.

Famously, out of reverence, orthodox Jews don’t use God’s name at all. The early Church Fathers, and later the mystic tradition, recognized the power of apophatic language when conceiving of God—that is, speaking only of what God is not. Vivid in my mind are examples in my own life when, out of sheer gratitude or sorrow or beauty, I have been unable to articulate my own experience of God.

Maybe this kind of lack of intelligibility marks a true encounter with God. And if that’s the case, we may have a lot to learn from our friend Ezekiel…and possibly others that I would be just as tempted to dismiss.

In Christ,

—Kyle