In the middle of summer in Year II of the weekday lectionary, the Church’s First Reading includes excerpts from the major prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel wrote during and after the Exile.

To situate the story: For those who remember their grade school world history, Israel was at the western end of the Fertile Crescent, the route to Egypt. The great civilizations of the ancient Near East clustered around the major river valleys: the Nile in Egypt, and the Tigris and Euphrates that would nurture various civilizations, the most important of which were the Assyrians and Babylonians. To their east lay Persia. Being in Judea was like living in the left hand lane of I-80: everybody came through the land on the way to the great powers along the Crescent.

(Israel and Judea or Judah had divided after the death of Solomon. Israel, the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom, fell to the Assyrians starting in 732 BC. Judah, the two tribes of the Southern Kingdom, would fall to the Babylonians starting in 597 BC.)

The Jewish people’s history was uniquely defined by its relationship to God. “You will be my people, I will be your God.” That was its defining reality.

But Judea was also tempted by purely temporal, political power. Israel and Judea had already been alienated from God, allowing local cults to infiltrate Jewish religion and engaging in social injustice. Around the year 600 BC, Judea decided to dabble in politics, playing Egypt off against Babylon. Jeremiah called Judea to conversion, to rely on God rather than power politics. He was ignored. Babylon invaded. The Jews were carried into Exile in Babylon. Jerusalem was burned.

Remember that the Exodus had been the constituting event for Israel: deliverance from Egyptian slavery, the making of a covenant with Israel, the entry into the Promised Land. Israel’s identity was always tied up with the land God gave her. And, with the Babylonian Exile, that land was gone and they were once again captives in a foreign land.

The approximately fifty years of the Babylonian Exile was a time for the Jewish people to engage in spiritual introspection, to abandon their political calculations and recognize that it was their infidelity to a God who was faithful to them which had brought this calamity upon them. It’s why Ezekiel prophesies the raising of the dead bones of Israel (First Reading on August 23; here), though the prophet foretells more than he even imagined. The Babylonian Exile ended in 538 BC when the Persians, who had taken over the Babylonian Empire, sent the Jews back to their land. There they labored to rebuild Jerusalem and, especially, the Temple.

August 14’s reading (Ezekiel 9:1-7; 10:18-22; here) gives us a taste of this reflection. It discusses the destruction of Jerusalem as an act of divine justice. God first sends an angel to mark “the foreheads of those who moan and groan over all the abominations that are practiced within” [Jerusalem] with the Hebrew letter ת (thau) (Ez 9:4). The designation parallels the marking of the lintels of the homes of the Jews with the Paschal Lamb’s blood at the time of the Passover (Ex 12:13) and foretells the marking of the elect “with the seal of the Living God” in the eschatological tribulation described in Rev 7:2-4.

Once those who grieve over Judah’s “abominations” are marked, the other five angels are released to punish Jerusalem, “begin[ning] at my sanctuary. So they began with the men, the elders, who were in front of the Temple” (Ez 9:6b). Judgment begins at the Temple and then spreads to the rest of the city. That is not insignificant. What should be holy is not, and that is where judgment begins. August 14’s reading patches in Ezekiel 10, which describes the departure of God’s Glory (kabod) from the Temple, taken up to heaven by angels.

The parallels between that passage and our contemporary ecclesiastical situation are striking. The People of God which constitutes the Church are called to be God’s Holy People. The Church herself is marked by four notes: unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. But the ongoing filth of the Church’s sex abuse scandals mars that holiness. We are now in year six since the revelations surrounding Theodore McCarrick, one of the authors of the “reform” in the post-Boston sex scandals that was supposed to resolve that crisis after 2002. In the six years since 2018, however, we have been treated to a constant drip, drip, drip of scandals, so much so that — while high-placed ecclesiastics want to write it off to times past — it seems to have become the new ecclesiastical normal.

Meanwhile, Church focus has moved from conversion and reform — both as an internal agenda and a message to the larger world — to “accompaniment” and diversion. Read Ezekiel 9-10; the sacred writer does not sound like he would have gotten a job as a ghost writer for this October’s synod. He speaks of “abominations” and the need to clean up, starting with those “who were in the front of the Temple.” The judgment is uncompromising: “Do not look on them with pity or show any mercy!” And, while there is much talk of “reform,” the ongoing drip, drip, drip of scandal suggests the rhetoric is more about diversion than any real effort to uproot the problem.

Ezekiel was not alone. The Jews who returned to Jerusalem after the Exile rebuilt the Temple but focused on moral purity. And while there were always temptations to default to cultic purity and mere ritual observance over moral integrity, the best of the prophetic and wisdom traditions in the remainder of the Old Testament focus on a fidelity to God in spirit and truth. It is presaged in Ezekiel’s vision of the resurrection of Israel’s dry bones. That promise is given us and realized in the New Testament (Jn 4:23). Are we serious about the cleansing of the temple?