Hallowed Be Thy Name

I. What the nations say

By a canal in the land of the Chaldeans lives a priest who has lost his temple.

Ezekiel, the son of Buzi, has been carried off in the company of his king and set down among the displaced at the Chebar canal.1 He is still a priest; the house he was trained for he will never enter. Of his arrival among the exiles he writes one sentence, and there is not a word too many in it: "and where they sat, I sat — seven days, stunned, in their midst."2

Where the exiles live, people talk about them. It is said in passing, and whoever says it means little harm by it — not against them; about them, the way neighbors talk about neighbors.

"These are the people of YHWH, and they have gone out of his land."3

That is all it is: an observation, and the inference beneath it that no one needs to voice. A god ought to keep his people in his land. This people is walking about here. Do the sum.

Ezekiel does not need to have this reported to him. It is said in his presence.

The word that comes to him about it calls that the profaning of the name, and it adds how the profaning went about its work: they profaned my holy name, in that people said of them. The profaning takes place in the mouths of the bystanders. The name is not disgraced by what the children did — it is disgraced by what happened to the children.

Anyone who has children knows the mechanism. A father is not judged by what he says about himself; he is judged by the state his children are in. The nations saw displaced children, and they drew their conclusion about Him.

Then comes the sentence on which everything hangs.

"But I had pity on my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations to which they had come."4

Pity — for a name. Not for the exiles, the text says; for the name. It sounds as if the children lose out to the honor, but it works out the other way: precisely because the pity is for the name, the children can no longer escape the good. Whoever has bound his own name to his children can no longer save his honor without saving them.

That word does not arrive in a palace, nor in a sanctuary. It arrives with one man among the exiles, who has heard the neighbors talk.

II. "Not for your sake"

Then Ezekiel is given a message to carry — say to the house of Israel, the word itself says — and it begins with the hardest thing in it.

"It is not for your sake that I do this, house of Israel, but for my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you have come."5

Not for your sake. Whoever still looks here for any merit of his own is shown the door in a single clause.

And then, in the same breath, without so much as a verse in between, the tenderest thing a displaced person can hear:

"I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the lands, and I will bring you to your own soil. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will give you a new heart and a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your body and give you a heart of flesh."6

He fetches, He brings home, He washes — and then He goes deeper than a person can reach in himself: the petrified interior taken out, and in its place a heart that feels again. It is what a father does with a child who has been out too long.

And where it leads is added in family language: "you will live in the land that I gave your fathers; you will be a people to Me, and I will be a God to you."7 No condition beforehand, but an address afterwards. The sentence ends at a house where both live again — He and his own.

Precisely because He does not do it for their sake, nothing can come between any more. A rescue that rested on the children would break where the children broke. This one rests on the name — and the name does not break. "Not for your sake" is no rejection; it is the reason the promise holds.

And none of this is entrusted to a king or to an army; it is put in the mouth of the priest at the canal, who has to go and say it to the people he lives among.

III. A homecoming with an audience

For the hallowing of that name Ezekiel has the same words every time, and what stands beside them is the same every time.

"[...] when I lead you out from the nations and gather you from the lands in which you are scattered — and I will be hallowed in you before the eyes of the nations."8

In Ezekiel the hallowing of the name is something other than a liturgical moment. It is a homecoming with an audience. The same nations that drew the conclusion — that God could not keep his own land — stand by when the procession returns. The neighbors' sentence is not refuted with an argument. It is refuted with a family that is complete.

That is how it works on every street. About a father whose children have become scattered, all sorts of things are said; there is only one thing that silences all those sentences at once, and that is the day people see them coming back, one by one, and the door closes behind the last. What is said about the father that day, he no longer needs to say himself.

The first petition asks exactly that. It is not about distance. It lays before the Father what his name hangs on: fetching the children, before the eyes of everyone who ever concluded anything about Him. And the man who first heard it put this way was himself sitting among the children it concerned.

IV. The Name beneath the command

The petition has a foundation verse, and Ezekiel does not need to look it up. It stands deep in Leviticus, among the regulations for the priests — his own trade. Bread to be set out, offerings to be inspected, names to be pronounced: it is the craft he was trained for and will never practice again.9 Precisely there, where the holy passes daily through human hands and reverence can wear thin, it is said.

Twice, in fact. Earlier in the same chapter the prohibition has already been given once, and there to the priests alone: "speak to Aaron and to his sons [...] and they shall not profane my holy name."10 Only after that, with the circle widened to all the Israelites, does the foundation verse sound. And the man who centuries later reports that it has happened — with the same verb — is a priest.

"You shall not profane my holy name; and I will be hallowed in the midst of the Israelites. I am YHWH, who hallows you."11

Beneath the command stands a Name, like a signature: YHWH Mekaddishkem — YHWH who hallows you. The command says: do not desecrate my name. The signature says: it is I who consecrate you. In this verse holiness does not flow from the people to God; it flows from God to the people, and the people are asked only not to tear down what that current is building.

Whether Ezekiel thought of this chapter of Leviticus when he heard the neighbors, the text does not say. What it does say: he knew the law he could no longer carry out, and what that law forbids is exactly what he heard happening in the street — the name profaned, right among the people who bear it. The command and the report belong together like a warning and the news that it has come true.

And there the reciprocity of the first petition already stands, centuries before the prayer. The child asks God to do to his own name what God says He does to the child. "Hallowed be thy name," says the child. "It is I who hallow you," says the Name. Which of the two was at work first, the foundation verse does not leave in doubt.

The form of the petition says the same: hallowed be — not "let us hallow". The child does not say that it is going to do something. It asks that something happen to its Father's name, by the One who alone can do it.

And the next verse adds where this hallowing Name has its credentials from: "who led you out of the land of Egypt to be a God to you — I am YHWH."12 Here too the hallowing hangs on a leading-out. What Ezekiel says about the return from Babylon, the Torah already says about the exodus from Egypt: this Name becomes holy in fetching his people.

The priest learned the command in his trade; the street let him hear that it was broken; and the word at the canal tells him that the signature beneath the command is being honored.

V. The two who make themselves great

Ezekiel looks further still, beyond the return. The setting of the Gog chapters is a people already brought home — fetched back from the nations, living in villages without walls.13 That is how people live who know they are safe; whoever builds a wall is reckoning with something.

Straight at that people comes the last assault, from the far north, with many nations in its train — at the children who have only just come in, because they have only just come in and live defenseless. And at the close of that battle God says something that nowhere else sounds from his mouth in this way:

"I will make Myself great and hallow Myself, and I will make Myself known before the eyes of many nations. And they will know that I am YHWH."14

Making oneself great — in Scripture that is suspect language. It is what rebels do. And indeed: there is one more who does it. In Daniel there is a king of the end who "will make himself great above every god".15

Two voices, in one and the same verb, facing each other. A king who makes himself great above — above every god, and so above everyone. And God who makes himself great before — before the eyes of many nations, with his children brought home behind him. Two builders, facing each other once more, compressed into a single verb form.16

And the name is hallowed after the last revolt: not in the quiet of a sanctuary, but on the day that the last hand to reach for the children has been held back. The first petition, then, looks ahead — its full answer lies on the other side of that day.

This too the man at the canal is given to hear. The word calls him here what it calls him throughout the book — son of man — and it lets him look beyond the last grab at the children.

VI. To the very last page

The same exile has one more voice. In Babylon itself lives another deportee from the same Judah — younger; taken away as a boy — and what he does one night is the reverse of what the neighbors did.

A death sentence hangs over him and his three friends — the king wants to hear a dream that no one can retell — and the four have used the night to ask the God of heaven for mercy.19 In that night the secret is revealed to him. And the first thing he says is no sigh of relief. It is a blessing, in the Aramaic of the court:

"Blessed be the name of God, from everlasting to everlasting."20

May something happen to the name — a wish about the name, from the mouth of a child in exile, in the city where the neighbors drew their conclusions. It is the same movement as the petition, centuries earlier.

And it is the mirror image of the street Ezekiel knows: the neighbors spoke about the name and dragged it down; the child speaks about the name and raises it up. What is said about a Father evidently depends on who is speaking — one who stands on the sidelines, or one who belongs to Him.

And the petition itself runs on until just before the end of the Bible. There, among the last things that are said, its form sounds once more:

"Whoever does wrong, let him still do wrong [...] and whoever is holy, let him still be hallowed."21

In fairness: the subject there is not the name but the human being. The same form, a different subject. What links the two is no quotation — it is the signature from Leviticus. If on the last page the holy one is still being hallowed, then that is the Name-who-hallows-you finishing his work, down to the very last verses there are.

So the first petition runs from a street in Babylon to the end of the book: from a name lying in disgrace because the children are out, to children who are called holy because the Name has brought them home.

Of Ezekiel himself no homecoming is told. What is told stands at the end of his book: in visions he is brought to the land, he is shown a new temple, down to its measurements, and he sees the glory of the God of Israel coming from the direction of the east.

For what he then sees, the priest has only one measure: "like the vision I had seen by the Chebar canal."22 The word first found him by that water; the last thing he sees, he measures against it. And he falls on his face.