July 3rd, 2021

For the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, the Old Testament reading happens to be from the book right after the book of the reading for the fifth Sunday, the book of Lamentations. [This order of the Old Testament is the order with which most people are familiar.] The text for this Sunday is from the book of Ezekiel [2:1-5]. And this is the earliest text for that book within the three-year series of readings; there is never a reading from Ezekiel’s first chapter.

The first chapter of Ezekiel is a significant one, especially since, within the three-year series, the Old Testament readings are designed to connect to the readings from the four gospel accounts. And many Christians in the past centuries have connected, in various ways, Ezekiel’s special vision and its four living creatures to the four gospel accounts of the New Testament. There have also been various connections between the four living creatures of the vision and some other admittedly important things in creation. It may be helpful to look at some of those connections and to consider, at least briefly, why they came about.

What essentially was this vision in Ezekiel, chapter one? At the beginning of the first chapter, the writer explains that he saw ‘appearances of God’ (1:1b; literal translation). At the end of the first chapter—which, by the way, is the beginning of the second chapter in the Greek translation—the writer notes that this was ‘the appearance of the likeness of the glory of Yahweh’ (1:28; again, a literal translation). In a word, the vision is about ‘glory’.

Literally, the word ‘glory’ means ‘weight’ or ‘heaviness’ [William L. Holladay’s A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament; Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA; page 150]. The colloquialism, ‘to throw one’s weight around’, gets us quickly to the significance of this word. What is the significance or weight of these four living creatures which are given such close attention in this first chapter of Ezekiel?

To see what others have said, and to have a better appreciation for those things that are ancient, the Ancient Christian Commentary series is very helpful, and the following quote, which admittedly is EXTREMELY long, has been taken from the volume on Ezekiel and Daniel. You may find the references too detailed, but the variety has been laid out in a clear and meaningful summary, and yet with some great and helpful detail:

We have already mentioned the four living creatures—the man, the lion, the ox and the eagle [the order of the living creatures in Ezekiel 1:10]. Because of the complex schemes that were developed in the patristic period, a word of fuller explanation is needed….

The first scheme identified the lion as John, the ox as Luke, the man as Matthew and the eagle as Mark [the order of the living creatures in Revelation 4:7]. This is what we come across in Irenaeus (Against Heresies 3.11.8), and it is followed by Victorinus of Petovium in his commentary on Revelation; Juvencus, the Spanish presbyter-poet; and Chromatius of Aquileia, in his commentary on Matthew. They all give the same rationale: the lion is John, because his Gospel begins full of confidence; the ox is Luke, because his Gospel begins with priestly sacrifice; the man is Matthew, because his Gospel begins with the genealogy of Jesus; and the eagle is Mark, because his Gospel begins with the prophecy of Isaiah (Is 43).
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The second scheme becomes the standard one: the lion is Mark, the ox is Luke, the man is Matthew, and the eagle is John. This arrangement first appears in Epiphanius’s On Weights and Measures, and he is followed by Jerome, Apponius and Gregory the Great. They all give a similar rationale and again use the opening words of each Gospel to support them; Matthew is the man because he begins with a genealogy; Mark is the lion, roaring in the desert, like his prophetic opening; Luke is the ox, because he begins with temple sacrifice; and John is the eagle, flying heavenwards like the divine Word.

The third scheme we first come across in the fragments of Hippolytus on Ezekiel, and he is followed by Augustine (who enters some caution about these schemes, observing that they should all point ultimately to Christ alone), Ambrose and Primasius of Hadrumetum. The lion is Matthew, because Christ is descended from the tribe of Judah; the ox is Luke, because Christ is shown in his priestly glory; the man is Mark, because of the humanity of Christ shown in that Gospel; and the eagle is John, because the mystery of the Word ascends to heaven.

It is interesting to speculate on why these schemes were worked out in the first place. Irenaeus may well have been following a tradition going back to Papias, and since the canon of the New Testament was in process of formation, such a typology, whether from Ezekiel or Revelation or both, could give support to there being no fewer and no more than four Gospels. At any rate, the fact remains that the aforementioned writers, representing both mainstream and out-of-the-way profiles, developed this tradition of interpretation….

Meanwhile, in the East, where the book of Revelation was more suspect, other ways of interpreting the creatures emerged. There are the four elements, with the lion as fire, the ox as earth, the man as air and the eagle as water. This is what we find in Methodius of Olympus and Novatian. Macarius and Ammonas avoid the book of Revelation and stick to Ezekiel when they interpret the creatures. For Macarius, the eagle is the king of birds, the lion is the king of the wild beasts, the ox is the king of domestic animals, while man is the king of all creatures in general. He also makes them correspond to the four ruling factors in the soul: the eagle is the will, the lion is the conscience, the ox is intelligence, and the man is love. Ammonas takes another psychological approach: the lion is a cherub, the Spirit of God resting on the soul to enable it to praise God; the man is the desire to inquire; the ox is faithfulness in struggle; and the eagle is the desire to ascend to the heights. [Introduction to Ezekiel by Kenneth Stevenson, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament, Volume 13; InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, USA, 2008; pages xxiii-xxv.]

There is admittedly a lot there. But there is a lot of history in anything that has been around for thousands of years.

God has a lot of weight and significance, of that, there is no doubt. He is certainly significant when it comes to the universe’s four elements, the creation of various animals or beasts, or even the creation of the four ‘ruling factors of the soul’. But how important are these factors when the perspective becomes an eternal one? When and how does God REALLY ‘throw his weight around’? At that place is truly his glory.