Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45
In 2011, I went with my son, Joshua, as a chaperone for his senior class trip. We went to London. While there we decided to attend William Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It, at the Globe Theater. It was magnificent! My favorite part was hearing Jacque utter his famous line, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.”
His point is that people have parts they play throughout their lives like actors do in a play. For many of us, we put on a mask that looks like the person we want the world to believe we are. We create a public persona that keeps people from seeing the doubts and struggles and challenges we really face.
Through the years, many call our façade our false self. Underneath, sometimes well hidden, is our true self, the self we’re afraid to let anyone see because we just aren’t sure it measures up.
Lent, with all its reflection and prayer, is often a season in which God strips away our false self to allow our true self to emerge more fully. It sometimes feels like death – the death of that which is false in order for something truer to come to life.
One of the great paradoxes of faith is that in order for us to truly live, we must die. Before we reign with Jesus in his glory, we must share in his sufferings. In order to become a new creation in Christ, the old self must be crucified with Christ that he might live in us. Before resurrection, there must be death. Before the crown, there is a cross.
The good news is that the only thing we stand to lose is the false self, which is a façade and not real anyway. It’s a mask. The thing that passes away was never really useful to begin with!
In Ezekiel’s passage this morning, God takes the prophet to a valley full of bones. They were very dry. God asks Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel answers, “O Lord God, you know.”
As Ezekiel obeys the Lord and prophecies as instructed, the bones come together. Then there were sinews. To those God added flesh. Over those he laid skin. And finally, Ezekiel called on the four winds and the bones were filled with breath. They lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.
Thomas Keating suggests the spiritual journey is a series of small humiliations of the false self that make room inside us for the Holy Spirit to come and heal. The things that prevent us from coming to God and experiencing transformation are slowly taken away. It is often suffering that God uses to do this, but even Jesus learned obedience through the things he suffered (Hebrews 5:8).
During Lent, we practice dying in small ways so that when the bigger deaths come, we will know how to let go of that which we really never needed. It is a time to learn, as Jesus did, obedience through the things we suffer. It is a time to experience what it is like to have our false self, our mask, wasting away as our inner person is renewed day by day.
All the world may be a stage, however, our audience is not the world, but our creator and sustainer – the one who makes our dry bones dance and breathe and sing. When we die to self and live for Christ, God uses our suffering and trials to strip us of our masks and to teach us to truly live.
For reflection:
- What needs to die in me in order for the will of God to come forth in my life?
- What new thing is God doing in my life that requires some of the old things to pass away?
- Where do I sense God wanting to teach me obedience through the things I’m suffering?
Read this week:
March 27: 1 Kings 17:17-24; Acts 20:7-12
March 28: 2 Kings 4:18-37; Ephesians 2:1-10
March 29: Jeremiah 32:1-9; 36-41; Matthew 22:23-33
March 30: 1 Samuel 16:11-13; Philippians 1:1-11
March 31: Job 13:13-19; Philippians 1:21-30
April 1: Lamentations 3:55-66; Mark 10:32-34
April 2: Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29; Matthew 21:1-11