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31 May. Ezekiel chapters 4-7
Ezekiel was undoubtedly master of the ‘acted parable’ or ‘acted prophesy’. Using vivid language as Jesus did was not enough for him. Such was the import of his message that the exile was God’s punishment for Judah’s sins, and that further destruction of Jerusalem would follow (in 586BC, about eleven years after the first siege and exile), that he felt called to go to extreme lengths to demonstrate the message in action.
In chapter 4 it meant the physical suffering of lying, bound in ropes, on his left side for 390 days (over a year) to represent 390 years of rebellion against God. During this time (in which he was brought only flour and water, and baked bread over cow dung) he had to act out the siege of Jerusalem using a model of the city. All this presumably took place in public so as to attract the attention of passers-by. The nearest equivalent to this today would be the Greenpeace activists who chain themselves to military installations or invade whaling vessels, or perhaps Brian Haw who protested in a tent outside the UK Parliament for nearly ten years. Such people disturb the complacency with which most of us meekly accept the injustices that we see around us, even when we know that people will suffer if they are not challenged.