Thought for the Day 25/03/21 - How can you cope with the menace of mortality?

 AUDIO
One of Port Talbot (well, Margam)'s famous acting sons really surprised me last weekend.
Sir Anthony Hopkins, aged 83 and now living in Los Angeles, California, popped up on Twitter quoting in Welsh (obviously) the old Bishop Morgan version of the Bible.

William Morgan’s Y Beibl cyssegr-lan was the first full translation of the Bible into the Welsh language in 1588 and its use has been credited with maintaining the language up to the present day.

I simply hadn't expected it from Sir Anthony.

Looking well but clearly feeling the passage of time, Anthony Hopkins quoted rather out of context the text of Eseciel 37:1 

"Bu llaw yr Arglwydd arnaf, ac a'm  dug allan yn ysbryd yr Arglwydd, ac a'm gosodd yng ghanol dyffryn, a hwnnw oedd yn llawn esgryn."

Hopkins quoted it in Welsh from memory, which is commendable but for many incomprehensible. 

In English that verse reads like this:

"The hand of the Lord was on me, 
and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord 
and set me in the middle of a valley; 
it was full of bones."

                                                                                Ezekiel 37:1

And then with no word of explanation, he shot straight into quoting (some also say out of context) a short portion from Dylan Thomas's poem Fern Hill.

Again he added no explanation, but he headed his little video 'Today I celebrate life'.

So what was going through the octogenarian's mind?

Last month in the Sunday Times, Anthony Hopkins said that his latest role in The Father, (tipped for an Oscar in April) had made him more aware of “mortality and the fragility of life”.

“We’re all fragile, we’re all broken,” he said. 

“We can point fingers and condemn other people — it’s so easy because the world is a madhouse — I try to keep my mouth shut and enjoy life as best as I can.

We all pretend not to be, but we’re all lonely. 

Success is all fine, it’s a way to survive, but at the end, we’re all desperately, desperately alone. 

And that is the most painful and eloquent thing for me."

Being alive without life

Sir Anthony describes living without  the life-breath God gives, as he's missed the intention of the author of Ezekiel

Oh yes, he's a son Port Talbot can be proud of.

He's certainly had a great deal of success, but as an actor not as a Bible expositor!

What's ACTUALLY going on in Ezekiel?

The background to Ezekiel 37 is that the people of Israel have suffered for their sin and been cut off from the bountiful life that could  have been theirs in God.

They are suffering the angst of banishment from His presence and His Promised Land; not because they were not successful, but because they were quite simply rebellious.

This left them as spiritually dead as dry bones blanched in the heat of a desert valley, with no life and no hope of getting a life for themselves ... utterly beyond self-resuscitation ... and Ezekiel has been sent to them in the anguish this all brought them, to steer them back to the life that God gives.

God put the issue Sir Anthony has been addressing directly to the prophet Ezekiel like this: 

"He asked me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’

I said, ‘Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’

Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 

“Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 

This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: 

I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life."

                                                              Ezekiel 37:4-5

The point

It's when people famous or infamous, rich, poor, wise or foolish ... all broken as Sir Anthony describes ... stop and HEAR (pay attention) to the Word of the Lord that God can breathe breath into even blanched bones that lie lifeless in the desert, and when He does so those bones unfailingly live.

The Takeaway

It's hearing - actually listening to and living in the light of - the Word of God that 

• human brokenness is fixed, 
  
  
• human mortality is re-modelled, and that 
  
  
• the pain of broken life without God is 
  
  
• remedied, 
  
  
• ransomed and 
  
  
• redeemed.

How important then is it to you, would you say, that you HEAR the Word of the Lord?