😇 Lent 5
Readings: Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45.
From the TRNG Room:
Central Thesis/Theme:
In this Lent 5 reflection, I'm exploring what it means for breath — ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek — to be the animating force of life, resurrection, and divine presence. The dry bones of Ezekiel can be reconstructed, fleshed out, and still be missing the essential thing: the breath of God. My argument is that the spirit isn't some elevated theological abstraction. It is breath. It is wind. It is the most intimate exchange between creature and Creator, and it is what makes the difference between a body and a living being.
Key Textual/Historical Insights:
One of the most important things to recover here is that in both Hebrew (ruach) and Greek (pneuma), the words for spirit, breath, and wind are the same word. The Septuagint deliberately continues using pneuma — even where you might expect a word that simply means wind — because the text is doing something the translators want to preserve: collapsing the distinction between God's spirit and God's breath. Likewise, Adam and Adamah aren't proper nouns — they mean "earthling" and "earth/soil," pointing to the humility of human origin. And in Greek, the name of the first woman isn't Eve — it's Zoe, which means life, making her the linguistic ancestor of every time Jesus says "everlasting life."
Theological Argument:
What unites these four readings is a theology of gift: life is received, not generated. The bones in Ezekiel don't resurrect themselves — they are breathed into. The speaker in Psalm 130 watches for God the way a soldier on fire guard watches for morning — that's not passive waiting, it's desperate, attentive longing. Paul in Romans 8 distinguishes the body animated by flesh from the body animated by Spirit. And in John 11, Martha and Mary both say the exact same thing — "if you had been here, my brother wouldn't have died" — which I read as a human tendency to export responsibility upward, to the one with the most power, rather than sit with the mystery of mortality and divine timing.
Contemporary Application:
For those of us with military experience, Psalm 130's image of a guard watching for morning is viscerally real. CQ duty, staff duty, fire guard — you know what it means to watch for dawn not because it's beautiful, but because it means relief. That longing is theological. And Martha and Mary's impulse to blame the one in charge? That's familiar too. It feels righteous to hold leaders accountable, and often they are culpable — but it can also be a way of getting ourselves off the hook. The text disturbs our expectations about how power, presence, and rescue are supposed to work. That disruption is the point.
Questions Raised:
If ruach/pneuma — spirit, wind, and breath — is one word, what does that collapse mean for how we pray, worship, or understand divine presence?
What does it mean that Zoe (life) is a feminine proper noun in Greek, and how does that change the way we hear Jesus speaking about eternal life?
Why do both Martha and Mary say the exact same thing to Jesus — and what is John's Gospel trying to tell us by recording that repetition?
Is blaming God or leadership for what goes wrong a form of faith, a form of avoidance, or both?
What would it look like to receive life as a gift rather than claim it as something generated from within?
Reflection
Hey, and welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon. Our readings today come from Ezekiel 37, Psalm 130, Romans 8, and John 11. I am recording these a little late, so I'm sorry — but it is important to me that I finish what I started, so I'm going to keep doing it. Eventually, maybe I'll be doing these in advance.
In Ezekiel, we have the vision of the dry bones. One of the things I noticed — and tried to bring into the text — is that in Hebrew and in Greek, the word for spirit, breath, and wind are all the same. Ruach is spirit, breath, and wind. It's all the same word. And I wanted to recreate that. We probably intuit it already — the wind is like God's breath. If you don't have theologians and philosophers to explain it to you, it's just: that's the spirit of God. That's the breath of God moving across the land.
Now, I'm aware that if you think about your material body — Paul talks about this later, the difference between flesh and body — flesh is the involuntary, material part of you. Your mind, your psyche, your soul — that's the immaterial part. And it's closer to breath, because breath is both inside you as you inhale and leaves you as you exhale. That's your spirit. Your breath. Just as the breath of God is the spirit, the wind going back and forth across the land.
I tried to play with that in the text, and it matters because Greek continues to use pneuma for spirit in this passage — even where you might expect the word that simply means wind. It keeps using pneuma in order to do what I just described: instead of capitalizing "Spirit" as if it's an elevated theological term, the text is saying it's the spirit, little s — the breath of God. And what the bones lack, even after they get flesh, is spirit, wind, breath. That is the transformative thing. Because of course the air, which is also what wind is made of, goes into you. The breath of God goes into you too. That is the spirit of God in communion with your spirit, your breath.
Also, Ben Adam is doing a lot of work that we tend to take for granted. Ben Adam — the Hebrew "son of Adam" — but Adamo is not a proper noun. It's a shortened, informal version of Adamah, which is the earth's soil. It can be red and ruddy. When it's fertile, really good dirt — if you've ever been to Hawaii, the soil is red because of how recently the volcanic rock has broken down and become earth. That indicated rich, fertile soil. That is why the ruddiness of Esau is significant. "Rugged" and "red" are like cognates in Hebrew — they kind of rhyme, adom and edom. And in the indigenous imagination — and I'm not claiming to be indigenous — I mean pre-literate, pre-contact, pre-scribal. The earliest writings we have, Homer's Iliad, the Septuagint — these are scribal iterations of pre-scribal oral stories. So when I say indigenous, I mean before writing was invented.
Adam is not a proper noun. They wouldn't have thought of it as a name. They would have thought of it as "earthling" — Earth is Adamah, earthling is the shortened, informal form. Ben means son. And while that's gendered masculine, it functions the way "man" with a capital M used to function for my parents and grandparents — as shorthand for the entire human species. So Ben Adam, translated with some flexibility, is really something like "Child of Humanity" or "mortal one." A lot of Hebrew writers would have heard it as self-referential in a formal tone — like saying, "I am any human creature." What makes me different from God, which is what the Hebrew Bible is trying to get through your head, is that you are mortal. God is not.
So I tried that on — "child of humanity," "mortal one."
In Psalm 130, verse 6, if you've ever been in the military, it says: "I wait for the Lord more than guards wait for the morning." Guards who watch for the morning. CQ and staff duty — if you know what those are, you know exactly what the psalmist is saying. I'm not going to explain CQ and staff duty. If you have a military friend, go ask them. But if you know, you know. It's one of those places where you really get the text if you have access to that military experience — not from movies, but what it actually means to watch for the morning. You're on fire guard. You can't wait for the sun to come up, because that means people are waking up and you can finally sleep. You watch everybody else so they can rest. That's the image.
In Romans 8 — you'll see in the text I added a wind-blowing emoji; not the other kind, just the wind — the word for "life" here is the Greek Zoe. And Zoe is the name of the first woman. We call her Eve in English, but that's because the Hebrew day begins in the evening. She's the beginning of all life — born in darkness, the way we spend nine months in the womb before we find the light. In Hebrew, evening marks the beginning of the day. So in English it might actually be more accurate to call this first woman "Dawn," because she's the beginning of everything. But in Greek, that word — the beginning of life — is Zoe, which means "life." If life were a proper noun, if someone were named Life, in Greek, that someone is the first woman. The mother of everyone. Her name is Zoe.
So when Christ talks about what we translate in English as "life" — everlasting life — he is naming the first mother. He is naming a feminine origination. We don't really have good tools for this in English; we're making up words to gender a language that has mostly lost those categories. But Jesus is consciously engaging gender in ways that violate the norms of his time and culture — not getting married, not having a formal education, being born under circumstances that would have marked him as illegitimate. To do that work suggests he is fully aware of gender and he is querying it. So when Christ says "everlasting life," when there is life because of righteousness, there is the earth-mother — the oldest mother, the first mother. That kind of righteousness. And it stands in distinction to the first man, whose name is just ish — man, human — while isha has a name in Greek: Zoe, life.
In Hebrew, the first male is just "earthling" — a human-nature hybrid. And when we say it out loud, "human nature" names exactly what Adam does in the story. It is human nature not to want to be alone. It is human nature to name the animals. It is human nature to do what someone else tells us to do, not because we're men or women, but because we trust other humans. And when those humans let us down, we want to blame them. So it matters to pay attention to the specific gendered nature of these texts. In doing so, it brings more to the surface — including the name of the first woman, whether you call her Eve, or Dawn, or Zoe. What that name is doing is pointing to wherever life comes from.
And that brings us to John 11, where Martha and Mary are calling attention to something. I don't have a prescription for what they're doing, but you may have noticed that Martha in verse 21 and Mary in verse 32 both say the exact same thing: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." That is a strange thing to say — and yet it feels right to say it. Whoever is more powerful than me, whoever is the leader — you weren't here and it's your fault. She doesn't quite say that, but she gets close. "If you'd have been here, he wouldn't have died." Let's blame the one above us for what's wrong.
I get it. That feels right in the military too. If something goes wrong, it's probably the officer's call. But to blame the officer — as right as that might feel — tends to get us off the hook. That's what I hear when I notice that Martha and Mary both say the exact same thing. John is clearly trying to tell us something. What is John conveying to John's audience? I hear in it this desire to export responsibility. You could have stopped this. You could have done something, if only you had been more powerful. Look how powerless you are.
I've seen bad leadership. I've seen people get hurt because of bad leadership, and yes, it is the leader's fault. But that doesn't mean it's all the leader's fault.
If I see the texts that make up the Bible doing anything uniformly, there's a very small number of things they are doing writ large — and one of them is disturbing and disrupting our expectations of how the universe is supposed to work and how it actually does. I don't want to say much more than that, because I know this has already been a long reflection. I want to stick to the main points I see in these texts and explain them, because you'll hear them. And if you go to pewpewhq.com/tfw, you'll see where I've laid these markers down — an invitation to look at these texts fresh, given what we know from twenty-one centuries of human thought and culture.
That's the reflection for today.
