No horror movie can quite catch this scene. A field of dry bones. Dry human bones. All over the place, as far as the eye can see. As if the Israel-Palestinian conflict had finally come to its insane conclusion, and you return a decade later to see the untouched remains. Dead people. People who had jobs and families and lives. Dead from the madness of being a people who spurned God and went their own way, a way which dried the love, the passion, the life-ness out of their lives. "Can these bones live?", God asks.
Ezekiel is afraid to answer the question. Ezekiel knows he doesn't know. He knows the Asker already knows the answer, but he fears the answer. Then God tells the prophet to speak God's words (that is what a prophet does, after all). First, the words turn the dry bones into skeletons, then skeletons into bodies. But they are still dead bodies. Then Ezekiel must speak again the command of God. This time, the bodies receive spirit from God, and once again come to life!
God knows this vision is stunning, so God tells Ezekiel (and us) what this means. (God sounds here a lot like Jesus does when He tells the disciples what the parable of the sower and the seed means.) God loves His people, and wants them to be alive. But their own deceit, and the resulting conquest by Babylon, have rendered them dead as a nation. The covenant appears to be finished. But God will have none of that. God will do what it takes to breathe new life into the dead bones of His people. God wants the nation to live. But it can only live if they give themselves over to the God who restores them, and choose to be God's people instead of their own or that of some other pretender.
Look ahead to Good Friday. Catch its dread : the God who loves us pays the price. We're too dry to restore ourselves. But Jesus took the dryness into himself. On Easter, Christ came back, restored to life. Since He left, the Spirit's sent out to God's followers everywhere, to bring new life to a spiritually-dry world.
Lord, I'm sick of this desiccation. Undry me, Father, and let your Spirit be breathed into me repeatedly like the air I breath. Let your Word go forth among us, in power. Amen.
There's also a downloadable Lent and Easter PDF file with lots of stuff about Lent, and Lent devotionals. Other downloads include PDFs on Holiness and on Prayer.