The Sentinel
September 6, 2026 • Proper 18 • Year A
Ezekiel 33:7-11 • Romans 13:8-14 • Matthew 18:15-20
Way back in the book of Genesis, right after the biblical flood, God set a basic ground rule for moving forward: “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, / by a human shall that person’s blood be shed” (Gen 9:6).
Things were simpler back then. The only humans were Noah and his family. God had just reissued his original command from the Garden of Eden: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” But back in the garden, God had told the humans only what they should do when it comes to human life: Be fruitful and multiply. Now, God tells them what they shouldn’t do: shed human blood. God also specifies what should happen if they do do what they shouldn’t do: “by a human shall that person’s blood be shed.”
It probably seemed like a solid system. What to do. What not to do. And a firm consequence.
As an added bonus, this rule about bloodshed sounds really cool in ancient Hebrew. The word for “human” is adam. (That’s where we get the name Adam.) The word for blood sounds similar: dam. The word order of the biblical text places these words right next to each other, with minimal filler words: dam ha-adam, ba-adam dam—meaning “[for] the blood of a human, / by a human . . . blood [shall be shed].”
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By the time the prophet Ezekiel tried to warn fellow humans about their destructive ways, things had gotten more complicated. But our reading today contains the echoes of this earlier ground rule from Genesis—echoes of adam and dam. The word that our reading translates as “mortal” is “son of man,” or ben adam—meaning “son of Adam” or “son of humankind.”
Here’s the new deal for the prophet Ezekiel, the ben adam: if God asks Ezekiel to warn people about their destructive ways, and Ezekiel fails to warn them, and they die in their destructive ways, then their blood—their dam—will be on Ezekiel’s hands. And he’ll have to pay for it with his own life.
For Ezekiel the prophet, God expands the basic ground rule. Ezekiel’s responsibility to other human beings doesn’t end with just not harming them directly. His responsibility is to warn them of harms coming their way. This expansion makes Ezekiel more responsible for preserving human life, but not entirely culpable for how they respond to what he tells them.
Then, God changes the format of the basic ground rule in an even bigger way. Instead of stipulating consequences, God creates a path for change and reconciliation.
God instructs Ezekiel to deliver this message straight from his divine lips: “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked.” According to the prophet Ezekiel, divine pleasure arises instead when “the wicked turn from their ways and live.” Ezekiel repeats this word “turn” twice more: “turn . . . , turn . . . from your evil ways.”
Our translation today translates the word “turn” as “turn back.” I prefer simply “turn,” because Ezekiel is not a nostalgic, backward-glancing prophet. Other biblical writers idealize the time when God and God’s people were like newlyweds, wandering in the desert, without material prosperity or political institutions or even a Temple getting in the way of their direct relationship. But for Ezekiel, there was never such a perfect time—no uncomplicated closeness after the exhilarating exodus, no purely fresh start after the flood, no perfect bliss of Eden to long for.
Instead, Ezekiel draws people forward, into new and unprecedented ways of being fully alive.
At the Easter Vigil service on the Saturday night before Easter, we hear many highlights from the long story of God and God’s people. Only the book of Genesis and the book of Ezekiel contain more than one passage that can be chosen for that service.
One choice from Ezekiel contains God’s promise of renewal from the inside out: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Eze 36).
The other choice from Ezekiel contains his famous vision of sinews, flesh, and breath reanimating the dry bones of people who were “slain.” The Lord says to these bones, through the prophet Ezekiel, “I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people . . . I will put my spirit”—or “breath”—“within you, and you shall live.”
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By the time of the prophet Ezekiel, it’s clear that no policy, no ever-longer list of commandments, no corpus of case law, can quite keep up with the children of Adam of Eve. No book of what to do or what not to do will cover every scenario. No ground rule can apply to all situations—except maybe the principle of loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Also, it’s clear that strict, explicit consequences don’t always deter. Sometimes, they backfire. They give humans the impression that God delights in carrying out punishments, rather than rejoicing when we embrace the life-giving ways God sets before us.
Throughout the biblical record, God struggles to be heard. Back in Genesis, God tries some wordplay: dam ha-adam, ba-adam dam (kinda Dr. Seuss). Through Ezekiel the sentinel, God tries repetition: “[let] the wicked turn from their ways . . . turn . . . , turn.”
But God also speaks through our hearts of flesh, through our veins of shared humanity, through a future promise that’s also a primordial echo: “As I live, says the Lord God,” “I will put my breath within you, and you shall live.”
~The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh