Scripture: Ezekiel 25:17 – “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful punishments. Then they shall know that I am the Lord, when I lay my vengeance on them.” (NRSVue)
How do we that God is with us? It is the very idea of faith. God is invisible and easy to deny, especially these days. And yet, when you are open to God, you can see God’s hand in beauty of the world and in the love that we have in our lives.
One way in which we can know God is also through justice, although this can be tricky, since many of the things that we think should happen to people do not. People say, “There if there is a God, then…” a person would be punished or exonerated. This rarely comes to pass, because that is not how God works. God is less a punisher and more of a presence. We often can find God only in hindsight. We look at a victory or a tragedy, and we recognize that God was with us in the joy or serenity we found. We look at how we weather a loss and say, “God was there.” We look at places where we did not intend to go, but ultimately worked out for the better and say, “God led me here.”
The Book of Ezekiel does a lot of things, but one is to repeat certain phrases. For example, when Ezekiel is addressed by God, he is often called “mortal”, or more literally, “son of man.” Another is the phrase, “shall know that I am the Lord.” The phrase is used seventy-five times in the Old Testament, and sixty of them are in Ezekiel. He says it again and again because he is living in an age of hopelessness when God seemingly abandoned the people to exile and annihilation. But Ezekiel sees God’s presence in all things, especially in judgment upon the wicked of the world.
Ezekiel 25:17 talks about God’s great vengeance and wrathful punishments. But most people do not know this phrase from Bible study or sermons, but from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. In the film, Jules Winnfield, a hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson, uses this passage whenever he kills someone. But while the last part about vengeance is found in Ezekiel, there is a lot about the righteous and the selfish, about being a brother’s keeper, about shepherds and the tyranny of evil men that is not. Tarantino made almost the whole thing up, but it sounds biblical. Actually, Ezekiel 25 is a relatively standard set of judgments against Israel’s enemies, in this case Philistia, Israel’s ancient enemy who celebrated the fall of Jerusalem.
Tarantino makes it more general, and while the passage is made-up, it forces Jules to reevaluate the violence in his life. He says, “I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a coldblooded thing to say…” And indeed, out of context, Jules’ words do sound cruel. But Jules realizes that know the reality of God is not in killing someone as an instrument of God’s vengeance, but in striving to be better, in trying to be a finder of lost children and a shepherd of righteousness.
So, when we say, “If there is a God, then…” we should not be looking for God’s vengeance, so we can scoff at the scoffers, as satisfying that would be. Instead, we recognize God’s presence in guiding us to safety and in giving us the compassion to help our fellow children of God. We recognize when people or nations fall, it is not so their enemies can feel vindicated, but so that they, too, might recognize the presence of God, and learn to be compassionate in the future.
Prayer: God, let me know your name in the love around me. Amen.
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