eating the bitter - 19th week Tuesday 2014

Ezekiel is commissioned to become a prophet to Israel, in the words of God, to become a watchman to the chosen people.  Both in the first readings yesterday, today and in the coming days Ezekiel would witnesses the shekinah of God, the glory of God or the presence of God leaving and abandoning the temple.  God abandons his people.  God no longer resides with his people, a prelude to the destruction of Judah and most especially the destruction of the temple.  It is like the movie Isang Araw Walang Dios, or the reaction of a mayor when he assessed the devastation in Tacloban the morning after Yolanda hit the city, saying, Where is God? God must have been somewhere else when Yolanda came.

This will be the bad news which Ezekiel was to say to the people.  God did not just say, Ezekiel listen and speak to them.  God did not just say, Ezekiel write my words and speak these to the people.  No.  God rather gave Ezekiel a scroll, he gave him a book and told him to eat the scroll, to eat, to chew and to savor every page.

We drink something liquid or we sip the soup from our spoons.  But when it comes to solid food we need to bite, to chew, crushing these with our molars and savouring every taste as we go along.  This is a signal to Ezekiel that what he was about to hear from God was something difficult, something hard, something obscure, something that will take time to accept and understand.  Gods word ca be severe.  In fact Ezekiel says that it was full of lamentations, wailing and woe.  And yet Ezekiel eagerly devoured God’s words, eating them and filling his stomach with them, saying even that it tastes as sweet as honey.

When we were young our parents kept a watchful eye as we ate telling us that food which taste bad are in reality good for us.  And so that was how we were made to eat amargozo, tugabang, okra, rabanos, kamatis and balunggay – under their stern eyes and threats.  Our food today, especially processed food has a lot of sugar in it because early on our tongues were trained to accept only the sweet and not the bitter.  Even our medicines are sugar-coated.  But some way, somehow we have to learn to take the bitter pill, as adults we have to learn to eat, to take what may not be agreeable and welcome.  We have to learn to hear what is not pleasing, to savor what may not come up to our liking.

This is the word of God.  We do not only listen to what pleases us, or to things that will comfort us.  We cannot tone it down simply because it might hurt our hearers and may displease them.  We should also be open to judgment, to things that may disturb us, to things that are critical of us.  In fact we should open ourselves always to self-criticism – to be critical of our own actions, to be accepting and open to our own faults and mistakes.   Because only then can we grow, only then can we mature.