The Scroll That Tasted Like Honey

Ezekiel was far from home.

He lived beside a slow brown river called the Kebar, in a land that was not his, among people who had been carried away from everything they loved. They sat by that water and remembered. And one day the sky tore open, and Ezekiel saw such glory that he sank down with his face to the ground. Light like fire. Wings like rushing water. A brightness too big to hold. It was the glory of the rainbow throne, the same glory that had rolled on its eye-rimmed wheels all the way to the river, because God goes wherever his people go.

Then a voice. And the voice was kind.

"Stand up," God said. "Son of man, stand up. I want to talk with you."

God wanted to send Ezekiel back to the people, carrying a true thing they did not want to hear: that they had wandered far, that wandering breaks things, and that God's heart was aching over them the way a father aches when his children won't come home to the table.

It was a hard job, the kind nobody wants to be the one to say.

"They may not listen," God told him. Gently, so Ezekiel would not be surprised. "But you go anyway. Whether they listen or not, let them know I was here. Let them know I came looking."

And then God did the strangest, tenderest thing.

He held out a scroll, a long rolled-up paper covered front and back with writing. And the writing was sadness: words of grief, and crying, and trouble.

"Open your mouth," God said, "and eat what I give you."

Eat it? Yes. Eat it. God did not want Ezekiel just to carry the words. He wanted them to go all the way down, inside, into the deepest part of him, so that when Ezekiel spoke them they would come out warm with feeling, not cold like a rule.

So Ezekiel opened his mouth. And he ate the scroll.

The scroll was full of sad things. But in his mouth it tasted like honey. Sweet, as sweet as anything he had ever tasted.

How can sorrow taste sweet?

Because the words came from God. Everything that comes out of God's mouth, even his weeping, is born out of love. A father's warning is not a stranger's anger. Underneath all the sadness was a longing so deep it tasted like honey on the tongue.

So Ezekiel became a watchman, the one who stands on the wall and calls out, who feels the trouble before anyone else and cannot keep quiet, because now he has the words inside him.

And do you know, one day there would come another Watchman. One who did not only eat God's words. He was the Word: every true thing God had ever longed to say, walking around in skin, with a face and a voice and tears.

And when he stood at last on a hill above a great city, a city full of people who had wandered far, he did not shout. He wept. He looked at them and ached, the way a father aches, and said how he had longed to gather them the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.

The sad-sweet words had become a Person.

And the Person had come to bring them home.