Furnaces, Bones

Evil learns.

When the Nazis started to mass-murder the Jews, they made soldiers or police battalions line the Jews along trenches and fire bullets into the back of the heads of these men, women, and children. The trenches took the corpses.

But there wasn’t enough land for all of the trenches for all of the corpses that the Nazis wanted to make.

And when a soldier fired a bullet into the back of a head, blood and brain and bits of skull blew back on him. That added to the demoralization of the killers.

The Nazis learned to have their servants fire the bullets into the spines in the back of the necks of their victims. This made less blowback.

But this method, too, was superseded. The Nazis made gas chambers. And trenches were superseded by the furnaces that sent the ashes of Jews into the skies over Dachau and Auschwitz and other death capitals.

      My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
        Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
      O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
         and by night, but find no rest. [Psalm 22:1-2 (NRSV).]

1. Nick-of-time stories.
 
Nick-of-time stories are popular – all is lost, but the hero bursts in at the last moment to make things right. Some are in the Bible.

The Egyptian army is bearing down on the Israelites. God parts the Red Sea to save his fleeing people.

God is about to rain firey hell on Sodom, where Lot lives. Angels in the form of men urge him to go. But he tarries. Finally, they literally take him by the hand to lead him out of the city. Then the destruction comes.

The Assyrian army surrounds Jerusalem. The Assyrian general taunts the people listening to him from the city walls. He says their God sent him to crush them. He tells them to come out to him, lest, holed up in their city without supplies, they eat their own dung and drink their own piss. In the night, and angel of God kills 185,000 in the the Assyrian camp. The Assyrians withdraw. At home, the Assyria king is assassinated by his sons.

Jesus is sleeping in a boat and his disciples are with him. A storm sweeps upon them, but Jesus keeps sleeping. When the boat is about to go down, they awaken Jesus. He rebukes the storm, and the sea becomes calm. (Then he rebukes his disciples.)

2. After-the-nick-of-time stories.
But the Bible also has stories where the last moment goes by, and there is no rescue, but things turn out well anyway.

In the book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are Jewish officials in the court of King Nebuchadnezzer of Babylon. The order goes out that all must worship the king’s golden image when they hear the music of the"horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, drum, and entire musical ensemble" (NRSV). Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego refuse to worship the image.

So they are condemned to die in a blazing furnace. Men throwing them into the furnace themselves die from the fire. No rescue comes at the last moment.

Rescue comes after these men are thrown into the furnace. Looking into the furnace, people see Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walking around, and even their clothes are not singed. And there is a fourth man with them.

The children of Israel saw themselves in Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Both pieces of the split kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been conquered; the people had been taken far away from their homeland. But, after this annihilation of their kingdoms, they were restored to their homeland by a benevolent king, and they began again as a united country.

Israel in that time was exactly the vision of the prophet Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones. Skeletons reassembled themselves, sinews connected the bones, flesh and skin and hair grew over the skeletons, and the bodies stood up.

The after-the-last moment theme continues in the New Testament. Martha and Mary and Lazarus are friends of Jesus. Lazarus becomes sick, and Martha and Mary send a message to Jesus and plead with him to come so that Lazarus will not die. Jesus tarries. Lazarus dies. Martha and Mary are devastated.

Grieving Martha acknowledges to Jesus that she trusts that Lazarus will rise in resurrection of the dead on the last day. But Jesus immediately calls Lazarus forth from his tomb and restores him to his sisters.

The Gospels themselves are after-the-last-moment narratives. The resurrected Jesus appears, unrecognized, to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They tell him about their hope that Jesus would redeem Israel, but he had been crucified. Jesus opens their eyes, and they recognize him, alive and with them.

3. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnaces of Dachau.

I am uncertain that I have any right to write about the Holocaust. But whatever its other effects, the Holocaust led to the restoration of Israel in Palestine. After the Holocaust, the Jewish state became a 20^th Century expression of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace. The skeletal survivors of the death camps made the scattered skeletons in Ezekiel’s vision live again in a resurrected Israel.

The prophet Ezekiel had a wife whom he delighted in. God told him that she would die, and she did. So when he saw the bones in the valley reassemble and rise, I suppose that Ezekiel must have thought about more than his helpless nation.

I think about the millions of victims of the Holocaust. I might be unorthodox, or I might not be. But God is God. On the last day, I would rather be a Jewish victim than a Christian predator. I want to believe that the fourth man who was in the furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego was with the Holocaust victims in their hour of death.

4. Dream.

I slept between beginning and ending this essay. I dreamed that my mom was young, happy, and alive. It was a good dream, until I remembered that I had gone to her funeral. Then I was frightened, because I thought that I had lost my mind.

5. Prayer.

Lord, I am not the first to say: I believe. Please help my unbelief. Amen.