As is often the case in worship at Seekers’ Haven, Evan Knappenberger’s ministry last week (12/22/24) was insightful and evocative. Frequently the half hour following worship allows for discussion that centers on the ministry that’s occurred, but this day Evan had brought forward a Bible passage that was less familiar and contained complex ideas that we did not feel ready to discuss, though I had a very strong sense that the topic was important and needed to be understood. Within the next couple of days, I had emailed Evan and asked him “to identify the passage in Ezekiel [that the ministry had rested upon] and paraphrase [his] ministry and the thoughts on the topic that [he’d] had since.” Within another couple of days, Evan had sent me the information and his thoughts on chapter 36 of Ezekiel, and so began our email discussion.
At Evan’s suggestion, I intend to post the significant parts of this discussion here at Abiding Quaker. I expect to do so over a few days, as both his and my emails are too lengthy to be included in one post alone. From Evan Knappenberger comes Part 1 of this short series titled “Shame and the Mixed Blessing.”
Evan wrote:
As I was sitting in meeting this last first day, the verse came to me which is from Ezekiel Ch. 36, viz v. 26, “I will give you a new heart and a new mind. I will take away your stubborn heart of stone and give you an obedient heart” (GNT) or, if you prefer, King James Version: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.”
As it has been some years since I read that passage, I was led to open a Bible and find it. As is my usual practice of opening the scriptures during meeting, I was led to look for context and for the spirit to reveal itself in the text just a little bit. Re-reading the entire 36th Chapter of Ezekiel was instructive.
Clearly God is telling the prophet that he plans to bless the exilic people of Israel, to bring them back together in their own land, and to multiply them and their flocks, to reinstate them as nation in a holy tradition. It would have been easy enough for the prophets of the exile to foretell this happy and most welcome reversal of their misfortune; for who does not readily cheer such good news that confirms us in all our patriotic and ethnocentric splendor? Many a post-nationalistic modern Friend might glance at Ezekiel (or Nehemiah or Ezra, for that matter) [and] might thus be put off by this seeming promise of fundamentalist resurgence: the sureness of political and tribal domination over the “heathen” (vv. 3, 5), for example, which the prophet delivers excitedly with repetitions of “Thus saith the Lord!” Has Thee heard? We are to be shamed no more but will prosper against all our neighbors!
And here precisely is where Ezekiel cuts short the celebratory self-congratulation. “I am not,” saith the Lord God of Israel, “doing this for your sake!” What’s that? How can this be? It is not our intrinsic virtue, our ethnic heritage, our cultural superiority, our pure cultus, our direct back line to David, our insistence on the Mosaic Law which has promised to deliver us. What then, how did we earn our salvation? By what virtue have we enticed Yahweh to heed our pleas? By none! “But for my name’s sake, which you have profaned among the heathen!” (v. 22)
Yahweh’s blessing upon those exiled Israelites is not contingent upon their own goodness, works, or purity. In fact, God is telling them plainly, you have failed even in exile—you have profaned my name; you have made me another idol among many; you have polluted the world with more filth (v. 25) rather than fulfilling your purpose of being a blessing to all the nations of the earth (recall God’s promise to Abraham). The Lord is going to do all these good things to you in spite of your failure and not for the sake of your pleasure, power, or plenitude, but in verses 26 and 27, the promise is much deeper: I will cleanse you from all this and give you new hearts of flesh.
Typically, Quakers might understand tenderheartedness and “hearts of flesh” in terms of conscientiousness, responsiveness to the tender mercies and leadings of the Lord who saved Jacob and Joseph and Abraham, who we also understand to be even He who saved George Fox and Margaret Fell and Friends of His down through the current day. This verse is the golden capstone of the pinnacle of God’s promise of restoration, by which we can understand the entire purpose of Yahweh’s setting apart of the people of Jacob: namely, to establish a politics of godliness and mercy and conscience on Earth as it is in Heaven. There is indeed much to wonder at in this passage.
But the chapter, the prophecy, [and] the story do not end there. Ezekiel reiterates God’s promises of plenitude and blessing to Israel. And then [there’s] something incredible. In verses 31 and 32, we hear:
Then shall ye remember your own evil ways, and your doings that were not good, and shall lothe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities and for your abominations. Not for your sakes do I this, saith the Lord GOD, be it known unto you: be ashamed and confounded for your own ways, O house of Israel.
What is this? Shame? What kind of blessing includes shame? Old Testament notions of blessing have never included this in their notional purview before: when Jacob steals the paternal blessing, for example, there is no explicit shame laid on him and his descendants for it. There has to this point in the Hebrew Bible been no such thing as a “mixed blessing.”
In effect, [with] the inclusion in the text of these two verses, the introduction of a complication to the notion of blessing itself within the narrative of the fulfillment of the primal Blessing, we are forced to reckon [that along] with the psychological reality of plenitude and restoration [comes] a hard and unrelenting feeling of Shame. Not just shame, but confoundedness and even loathing!
This warning of shame is to be the result of God’s blessing, not directly but as a byproduct of the plenitude of God’s goodness. It is there, surely, in the filthy abomination of idolatry in which the exiles have been struggling but has heretofore been unacknowledged among them by reason of their stoneheartedness.
When I was a soldier in the war in Iraq, we did some shameful things and justified them out of necessity: Yes, we killed those civilians, but we had to. Yes, we entrapped those people to their deaths, but it was necessary if not good. Yes, we mistreated detainees, and so on. It was only later, when we returned to the land of plenty, and went out to spend our pay on various vices that we began to comprehend the darkness of our own actions, and then only with encouragement and in the absence of other means of immoral coping.
We in America have been the recipients of much plenitude. Do we connect it with the shame of its origins? I don’t mean land acknowledgments, which have become rather formulaic recently, or even really any form of activism. There is no set form of tenderheartedness. The human conscience is responsive to God’s call and is as varied in content as God’s voice to each person. The real shame is not in how we acquired our wealth, our land, or whatever, but in how we have failed to perform God’s mission in the world; how we have failed to bring about the Kingdom of Conscience on Earth; how we have put various idols—church, politics, belief—in place of the immediate conscientiousness demanded of us.
I have no answers here, and I did not deliver all this long of a message in meeting. But for the sake of the Friends, sister Patricia Dallmann has asked me to elaborate, and this is for all Friends. Yes, there will be moments of inevitable shame and confoundedness, and that is okay. To be expected. But that is not the end of the story, and though we are given many good things and though we are washed clean by the Spirit again and again, we must wrestle with Yahweh for a mixed blessing.
E.K. Knappenberger
Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones, 1956, Benno Elkan (1877–1960)
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