Thou Knowest

Men with spades in a churchyard at Lutterworth in 1428, digging up a parish priest who had been dead more than forty years.

John Wycliffe had put the Bible into English and said things about the church that the Council of Constance condemned in 1415, thirty-one years after he was buried. Part of the sentence was that his bones should not lie in consecrated ground. They burned them and threw the ashes into the River Swift, which runs past the town. Two centuries later Thomas Fuller wrote the line everybody has borrowed since, that the ashes of Wickliff are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over. Men went to that trouble because they believed bones could still do something.

Ezekiel is set down in a valley of them, and the detail he returns to is dryness. There were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. Dry means long past. Nobody argues over dry bones or holds out hope about them. Then the question, and God is the one asking: Son of man, can these bones live? Ezekiel does not say yes, and he does not say no. O Lord GOD, thou knowest. He hands it back, which is the most honest sentence in the chapter.

God tells him later what the bones are, quoting what the exiles were saying about themselves: Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. The chapter goes on to answer the question, and the answer stands up on its feet, an exceeding great army. Fuller wrote with the outcome in front of him. Ezekiel had a valley, a question, and no information, and his position is the one you are standing in tonight. The dried thing you would name if somebody asked you: can it live? Answer that the way he did, and mean it.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 211 is Seeing His Face (Revelation 22:3-4).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two