Ezra 10:1-17
“While Ezra prayed and made confession, weeping and throwing himself down before the house of God, a very great assembly of men, women, and children gathered to him out of Israel; the people also wept bitterly. 2Shecaniah son of Jehiel, of the descendants of Elam, addressed Ezra, saying, “We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land, but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this. 3So now let us make a covenant with our God to send away all these wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law. 4Take action, for it is your duty, and we are with you; be strong, and do it.” 5Then Ezra stood up and made the leading priests, the Levites, and all Israel swear that they would do as had been said. So they swore.” (Ezra 10:1-5)
If you read today’s selection carefully – if you really try to embody what it would mean for you to be one of the “very great assembly of men, women, and children” (v. 1) – this passage is going to be a bitter pill to swallow. Really, imagine what it would be like to be a 58-year-old man with a foreign wife, four bi-ethnic children, a home, a field, a routine. Now imagine just being alone. And not alone because some tragic accident befell your family, but because you actively pushed them all away. Imagine coming home from this large church committee meeting we read about, looking at your spouse, and saying, “Honey, you and the kids are going on a trip and we’ll never see each other again.” I’m guessing you aren’t feeling particularly holy in this moment. Yet it was holiness – especially holiness via purity – that is center stage in this reading.
I’m honestly at a loss at what to say about such a story. The temptation is to gloss over these gritty details (the text clearly does). The temptation is just to say, “And that’s what we’ve gotta be willing to sacrifice for our faith.” And maybe that’s true, but dangit all if it seems really hard to say and probably even harder to hear.
Yet, if we’re going to be fair in our appraisal of this hard passage, we can’t only look at what such a sworn oath would mean going forward. We also have to look at how we got to this place in the first place. We have to understand that the commandment against intermarriage (yes, definitely profane to our Modern ears, but present at that time all the same) was well documented and well understood. We have to understand that there were – very likely – conversations with that hypothetical 58-year-old man from 40 years ago when he got married in which he heard “this isn’t good; this isn’t faithful” – and still he ignored those words. We also have to recognize that this isn’t only a case of this hypothetical 58-year-old man making a single mistake four decades before and only just now having the consequence of it come about. For while the mandate against intermarriage was well-known, there are also examples of places in scripture where that mandate has been, shall we say, massaged. For example, the prophet Jeremiah actually commands the earliest Israelites who entered into Babylonian exile to intermarry. For those Israelites, though, it was the command to enter such marriages that was the punishment. It was a way of saying, “You’re going to be so cut off from your own blessed people that you’ll have no other choices.”
What we’re witnessing here is the process of slowly being acculturated to sin, so much so that you no longer even recognize it as sin. Indeed, so much so that you even begin to think of the sin as a blessing (or, if not a blessing, at least so essential as to be unavoidable).
Friends, sadly, this is still true today. It takes many and varied forms. It often doesn’t occur for such a large group of people and is more often relegated to unhealthy or toxic family systems, friend groups, and workplace environments. But regardless of the specific way in which it presents, it is still the same pattern. And it is still happening… maybe even to you.
All of this can sound terribly heartbreaking and hopeless, except in this: We still have a Lord who died for our sins and rose to give us new life. We still have a Messiah to whom we can cry out, “Forgive us! Save us!”
I suspect the real terror of this passage is precisely that the consequence for these ill deeds were not immediate. The terror is that there is no statute of limitation on these sins. However, there’s another way to look at the matter: It’s that the consequence was not immediate, meaning there was space for grace. And, further, just as there is no statute of limitation on our sins, neither is there a statute of limitation on God’s grace either! We can always seek forgiveness for a sin, even if that sin is decades old.
Finally, let’s keep in mind that this passage is (as the past few weeks’ passages have been) from the “reconstruction” era of Israel’s history. This is what it looks like to leave a bad season and enter a new, better season. It’s hard, but the overall orientation of the life of Israel is now more firmly pointed toward their God. And while we may lament the consequences of past misdeeds, we can also choose to celebrate that our “arrows” are now pointed back to the heart of our love: God Himself. Amen.
