Reading: Ezekiel 1
The group discovers that God's glory appears to Ezekiel in Babylon, not Jerusalem, and concludes for themselves that God is not confined to his temple or defeated by exile.
God's transcendence and his real presence to his people everywhere: he is greater than all his works and closer to us than we are to ourselves, and no place is outside his reach.
This is the doorway to the whole study. A young priest who should be starting temple service in Jerusalem is instead sitting by an irrigation canal in enemy territory, and the heavens open there. The vision itself, storm, creatures, wheels, throne, glory, is strange on purpose: it is answering the question every exile was asking, which is whether their God had been beaten. Your job tonight is not to decode every wing and wheel. It is to let the group feel the shock of the address line: Babylon. If they walk out having concluded for themselves that God's throne has wheels and that he arrives where his people are, session 1 has done its work. Resist the urge to explain the vision before they have wrestled with it; the confusion is part of the text's design, and Ezekiel himself is flattened by it before the chapter ends.
Ezekiel is a priest, the son of Buzi, deported to Babylonia in 597 BC along with King Jehoiachin and thousands of Judah's leading citizens (the deportation described in 2 Kings 24:10-16, which does not name him; his presence in it is the standard inference from Ezekiel 1:1-3 read alongside it). The vision is dated to the fifth year of Jehoiachin's exile, which works out to 593 BC by the standard reckoning. The 'thirtieth year' of 1:1 is most often taken as Ezekiel's own age, which would be poignant, since thirty is the age Numbers 4:3 sets for Kohathite Levitical service at the tent of meeting, which many interpreters take as the background here; but the text does not say so explicitly, and interpreters have debated it since antiquity. Hold that reading lightly and offer it as likely rather than certain.
Fix this in your mind before the session: in 593 BC the temple in Jerusalem is still standing. It will not be destroyed until 586 BC, seven years after tonight's vision. Ezekiel is not writing consolation after a catastrophe; he is receiving a vision before one, and much of his early ministry will be spent telling his fellow exiles the disaster they refuse to believe is coming. This single fact is your strongest card in tonight's steelman exchange, so do not spend it early.
In the ancient Near East, gods were widely assumed to be territorial. A nation's defeat implied its god's defeat; a destroyed or captured temple meant a humiliated deity. The exiles by the Chebar are living inside that logic. Their king is a prisoner, their elites are resettled on Babylonian canals, and Babylon's own temples and processional ways proclaim the triumph of Babylon's gods. Psalm 137 gives you the emotional register: how shall we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land? Ezekiel 1 is God's answer, delivered in person.
The 'river Chebar' is best understood as an irrigation canal in the Nippur region of Babylonia, near the settlement of Tel-abib where the exiles lived (3:15). Note too that Babylon was full of winged composite guardian creatures in its art and architecture, human faces on animal bodies with wings. Ezekiel's vision speaks that visual language and then overrules it: the creatures the exiles see carved on their conquerors' monuments turn out to be, in truth, servants carrying the throne of the God of Israel. The vision plants his flag in their front yard.
Chapter 1 ends with Ezekiel on his face and a voice beginning to speak (1:28). That is deliberately mid-sentence: the vision is the setup, and the commission that follows is next week. Tonight, stop where the chapter stops. Do not read ahead into chapter 2, and if a participant has read ahead, ask them to hold what they found.
The vision is saturated with Sinai. Storm, cloud, fire, and brightness recall Exodus 19; and at Sinai the elders of Israel 'saw the God of Israel; and there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone' (Exodus 24:10). Ezekiel sees a throne 'in appearance like sapphire' (1:26). The point is quietly devastating for temple-only theology: God's most foundational self-revelation happened in a wilderness, outside any building, to a people between homes. He has done this before.
The 'glory of the LORD,' Hebrew kabod, is the visible weight of God's presence that filled the tabernacle at Exodus 40:34-35 and the temple at its dedication in 1 Kings 8:10-11. When Ezekiel says he saw 'the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD' (1:28), he is using precise priestly vocabulary: this is that same presence, and it is in Babylonia. Track this word through the whole study; where the glory goes is the plot of the book.
Three lines run forward from tonight. First, Revelation 4 shows the same throne and the same four living creatures in heaven, worshiping without interruption; the throne Ezekiel glimpsed is the throne that never stopped standing. Second, the New Testament loves the phrase 'the heavens were opened': at the Lord's baptism, and on the lips of the martyr Stephen, who sees the glory of God while standing on trial before the council (Acts 7:55-56). Third, and most carefully: at the very top of the vision Ezekiel sees 'a likeness as it were of a human form' (1:26) on the throne. The Church, reading backward from the Incarnation, has long seen here a shadowed hint that God's glory would one day show a human face (John 1:14). Present that as the Church's retrospective reading, which is how typology works, not as something Ezekiel consciously predicted.
Read these aloud where they land. Each is either a direct citation or an honest summary, labelled as such.
Gregory, preaching through this very chapter, teaches that the wheel within a wheel is the New Testament turning inside the Old: one revelation, moving together, so that the two advance as one. And he teaches that the divine words grow with the one who reads them; the same page gives milk to a beginner and fire to a saint. For Gregory the chariot is a picture of how God's word travels: alive, watchful, going wherever the Spirit goes, and never stuck.
Homilies on Ezekiel, Book 1. Summary of his teaching, not a direct quotation.
For the group. For anyone intimidated by how strange tonight's chapter is: this text has fed popes and beginners alike, and it meets each reader at their own depth.
Irenaeus argues that the Gospel is rightly fourfold, and he finds its image in the four faces of the living creatures around God's throne: the lion speaking of royal power, the ox of priestly sacrifice, the man of Christ's coming in our flesh, the eagle of the Spirit hovering over the Church. The creatures that carry the throne end up, in Irenaeus's reading, carrying the good news of the one who sits on it.
Against Heresies 3.11.8. Summary of his teaching, not a direct quotation.
For the group. The four faces your group just puzzled over have been read for eighteen centuries as a portrait of the four Gospels; the strangeness is not empty.
On the eve of his banishment from Constantinople, Chrysostom told his people, in substance, that he feared nothing that could be done to him, because the Church does not consist in walls and roof but in faith and life. The storm was raging, he said, yet he stood upon the rock; the waves might rise, but they could not sink the ship of Jesus, and no sentence of any emperor could separate him from God.
Homily traditionally titled 'Before His Exile'. Summary of his teaching, not a direct quotation.
For the group. For anyone in the room who feels far from the place where their faith once made sense: the place changed; God did not.
CCC 300. God transcends the world and is greater than all his works, and yet he is present to his creatures in their inmost being. Tonight's vision holds both truths at once: the throne is above the firmament, and it is parked in Babylon.
CCC 42. God transcends every creature, so our language about him must be purified of everything image-bound and imperfect. This is why Ezekiel stacks qualifiers: 'likeness,' 'appearance,' 'as it were.'
CCC 1137. The Church's liturgy participates in the heavenly liturgy that John sees in Revelation, centered on a throne standing in heaven and the one seated on it. The connection back to Ezekiel's throne runs through Revelation 4, which reworks his vision; that link is the tradition's reading, and the paragraph itself is about the heavenly liturgy.
CCC 104. In Sacred Scripture the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength; in the sacred books the Father meets his children and speaks with them. Ezekiel eating the scroll (2:8-3:3) is our image for what this paragraph describes.
Follow the glory (plant). Make sure the phrase 'the glory of the LORD' (1:28) gets said aloud and noticed tonight. Tell the group only this: watch where the glory is, every session. Do not hint that it moves. Where the glory goes is the plot of the book, and they must not see chapters 10 and 43 coming.
The LORD is there (plant). Tonight's driving question, where does God dwell, is secretly the book's question, and its answer is the study's title, drawn from the book's final sentence. Reveal nothing. Just make sure the question itself is left standing, open and unresolved, when they walk out.
Sealed guess (plant). The Take-Home sheet carries the My Guess box. Explain the mechanics at the end of the night: they write one sentence at home, fold the sheet or seal it in an envelope, and bring it back next week for you to keep unopened. The guesses are opened at session 12. Do not discuss anyone's guess or speculate aloud yourself.
Leader only. Do not raise these unless someone in the room does.
This vision is just incomprehensible weirdness. Why would God communicate in a way nobody can decode?
The overload is the message. Ezekiel is not given a diagram; he is given an experience that exceeds every category he has, and his breaking grammar ('the appearance of the likeness of') is the honest residue of that. A God who fit neatly inside a priest's existing categories would be a God small enough to be trapped in a building, which is exactly the theology this vision is demolishing. Note also that Ezekiel understands the part that matters: he knows he has seen the glory of the LORD, and he falls on his face.
If God let his temple be threatened and his people deported, hasn't he broken his promises to David and to Zion?
Hold this one loosely tonight because the book itself answers it slowly. The short version: the covenant always contained exile as its stated consequence (Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28), so exile is the covenant being kept, not broken, in its judgment clauses; and the vision itself shows the promise-keeping God arriving among the deportees rather than abandoning them. The full answer runs through 'my servant David' in chapter 34 and the new-heart promise of chapter 36; the phrase new covenant itself is Jeremiah's (Jeremiah 31:31), and Ezekiel's own term is everlasting covenant, so if the group raises it, honor the question and promise it a payoff.
1. The group can state in their own words where and when the vision happened, and why the location is shocking.
2. The group concludes for themselves, from the wheels and the movement of the vision, that God's throne is mobile and his presence is not confined to the temple.
3. The group encounters and answers, from the text's own dating, the strongest skeptical reading of the vision.
4. The group notices what Ezekiel's own grammar does as he approaches the throne, and why a careful priest would write that way.
5. Every participant leaves with the Take-Home sheet and understands the sealed My Guess mechanics.
For 75 minutes: opening prayer and Win, 12 minutes; the reading of chapter 1, 8 minutes; Build questions 1 through 5, about 28 minutes, with the discovery at question 5 getting a full 10; questions 6 through 8, about 17 minutes, with the steelman at question 7 getting a full 10; Send, Live It, memory verse, sealed-guess mechanics and closing prayer, 10 minutes. For 90 minutes, give the discovery and the steelman the extra room. This session was split out of a longer one and now has air in it; use the air on silence rather than on more explanation.
If you are running long, cut in this order.
1. Cut question 2 (the storm out of the north) first; fold its one essential point, that gods were assumed territorial, into your setup for question 7.
2. Cut the Dig Deeper boxes next.
3. If still pressed, merge questions 3 and 4 into a single question: 'What do the creatures and the wheels together tell you this throne can do?'
4. Never cut question 5 (the discovery), question 7 (the steelman), or the sealed-guess explanation.
Father, you are not far from any one of us. We come from a week of ordinary places, and we ask you to open the heavens over this room the way you opened them over an exile by a canal in Babylon. Give us eyes to see your glory, humility to fall on our faces before it, and appetite to eat your word and find it sweet. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Open questions. No wrong answers. Let everyone speak before you move on.
Keep this warm and unhurried; both questions are secretly loading tonight's theme, but do not say so.
Read Ezekiel 1 aloud in three parts with a short pause between each. Reader 1: verses 1 to 14. Reader 2: verses 15 to 25. Reader 3: verses 26 to 28, coached to slow right down. Ask everyone to listen for two things: where this is happening, and what direction things move. Stop at the end of the chapter. The voice that begins speaking in verse 28 is next week.
Numbered inductive questions. Ask, wait, let the group work the text. The answers are for you to share after the discussion, not before it.
1. Before anything strange happens, verses 1 to 3 give us a person, a place, and a date. What do we actually learn about Ezekiel and his situation, and why might each detail matter?
Ezekiel is a priest (1:3), deported to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin's wave of exiles, and it is now the fifth year of that exile, 593 BC by our reckoning. He is 'among the exiles by the river Chebar,' an irrigation canal in Babylonia, hundreds of miles from Jerusalem. The 'thirtieth year' is most likely his age, and if so it stings: thirty is the age Numbers 4:3 sets for Levitical service at the tent of meeting, and many interpreters read Ezekiel's line against it. This is the year his whole vocation was supposed to start, and he is in the one place on earth where it is impossible. Every detail says wrong man, wrong place, wrong time. And then: 'the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.' The most important word in the whole setup is the address.
2. The vision arrives in verse 4 as a great storm cloud flashing with fire. What did the exiles, and everyone around them, assume about where a nation's god lived, and what is this storm already contradicting just by showing up here?
In the ancient world gods were widely assumed to be territorial: a god lived in his land and his temple, and when your nation lost, your god had lost. By that logic the LORD had been defeated and left behind in Judah, and the exiles were now in Marduk's territory. The storm contradicts all of it. Storm, cloud, fire, and brightness are Sinai language (Exodus 19), the signature weather of the God of Israel arriving in power, and it is rolling toward an exile in Babylonia under its own steam. Nobody carried this God here as a trophy. He came.
3. Look closely at the four living creatures in verses 5 to 14. List their features. Never mind decoding the symbolism yet: what do the features, taken together, let these creatures do?
Each has four faces (man, lion, ox, eagle) looking in four directions at once, four wings, legs that gleam like burnished bronze, and they move 'wherever the spirit would go... without turning as they went' (1:12), darting like lightning. Take the features functionally: they see in every direction simultaneously, and they can move any direction instantly, without ever needing to turn around. Nothing is behind their back. Nothing is outside their view. Whatever these beings are carrying can go anywhere and misses nothing. Worth naming: Babylon's monuments were covered with winged composite guardian creatures, so the exiles are seeing their conquerors' visual language commandeered, and the creatures turn out to serve the God of Israel.
4. Now the wheels, verses 15 to 21: a wheel within a wheel, rims full of eyes, moving with the creatures wherever the spirit goes. Here is the real question: what kind of throne needs wheels?
A throne that travels. This is a chariot-throne, and that is the vision's thesis in a single piece of furniture. The exiles assumed God's throne was bolted to the floor of the holy of holies in Jerusalem; Ezekiel is shown that it rolls, in any direction, wherever God wills, and its rims are full of eyes so that nowhere it goes is unseen. God was never a prisoner of his own temple, and therefore he cannot be evicted from it, and therefore exile cannot cut his people off from him. The wheels are the whole book in miniature.
Later Jewish tradition named this vision the merkabah, the chariot, and treated it as the most dangerous text in Scripture to expound, with some teachers restricting its study. St. Gregory the Great preached a whole series on it and read the wheel within a wheel as the New Testament turning inside the Old: one revelation, in motion, never stuck.
Split into two teams. Team 1: turn to Exodus 24:9-10 and answer two things: what do the elders of Israel see under God's feet, and where in the world are they standing when they see it? Team 2: turn to Revelation 4:2-8 and list every detail John sees that you have already met tonight in Ezekiel 1. Give the teams four or five minutes, then have each report.
Let them find it. Exodus 24:9-10; Revelation 4:2-8
5. This vision does not come from nowhere, and it does not go nowhere. Let's find its roots and its future ourselves.
Team 1 finds sapphire under God's feet at Sinai, 'as it were a pavement of sapphire stone,' matching the throne 'in appearance like sapphire' in Ezekiel 1:26, and they find that the elders saw it in the wilderness: no temple, no city, a people between homes. God has appeared gloriously outside a building before; Ezekiel's exiles are not the first. Team 2 finds a throne in heaven, one seated on it with the gleam of precious stone, four living creatures carrying the same four symbolic forms, lion, ox, man, eagle, and unceasing worship. If someone notices the difference, name it: Ezekiel gives all four faces to each creature, while John gives one face to each. The throne Ezekiel glimpsed by a canal is, in John's vision, the permanent center of heaven, where the worship never stopped, not even during the exile. Sinai behind it, heaven above it: Babylon was never outside this throne's range.
6. Read verses 26 to 28 again slowly and count the hedge words: 'likeness,' 'appearance,' 'as it were.' By verse 28 Ezekiel is at three removes: 'the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD.' Why is the prophet's grammar breaking, and what does he do the moment he sees it?
Floor. If the group is struggling: just ask what it feels like when words fail you, and why words failing might be the honest response to God.
Ground. Walk the three removes in 1:28 out loud and let the group articulate why a priest would write that carefully.
Depth. Put 1:26 next to John 1:14 and Colossians 1:15 and let the group weigh how far the 'human form' on the throne can responsibly be read as a foreshadowing, and where honesty requires us to stop.
The grammar is breaking because language is hitting its ceiling. Ezekiel is a careful priest and he refuses to claim more than he saw: not God, not even God's glory nakedly, but the appearance of the likeness of it. That stacked hedging is itself theology: God so transcends every creature that our words about him strain and crack (the Catechism makes exactly this point at CCC 42). And yet notice what sits at the very top of the vision: 'a likeness as it were of a human form' (1:26). Reading backward from Bethlehem, the Church has long seen here a shadowed hint that God's glory would one day show us a human face (John 1:14); hold that as the Church's retrospective reading rather than Ezekiel's conscious prediction. Ezekiel's own response is the right one: he falls on his face. Glory is met first with worship, not analysis.
7. Let's be honest about the strongest way to read this chapter against faith. Here is how a serious skeptic would put it. Take it seriously before you answer.
The strongest form of the objection. Ezekiel 1 is best explained as trauma literature and theological damage control. A people whose national god lived in a temple just watched Babylon win. The psychologically predictable move is to relocate your god so the defeat doesn't count: borrow the winners' imagery, and Babylon was full of winged hybrid creatures and divine thrones, then announce that your god actually chose to come here. Every displaced people tells itself a story like this. The vision tells us about the exiles' coping, not about God.
Answering from the text. The objection deserves respect, and it has a stronger form still: a critical reader can treat the dates themselves as literary, part of a book edited into shape long after the events, in which case the chronology proves nothing. Say that version out loud before you answer it. What the text gives us is this: as the book stands, the vision is dated 593 BC, with the temple still standing and seven years left to it, and the case for wholesale later invention has to explain why an editor would compose a prophet whose early message is the opposite of comfort. Ezekiel, as the book presents him, is not rationalizing a catastrophe after the fact; he will spend the next twenty chapters predicting it, against the desperate hopes of his own audience, who wanted to hear that the exile would be short and Jerusalem was safe. Comfort literature does not tell its readers 'your god has come to Babylon and your beloved city will burn anyway.' Ezekiel was resisted and disregarded for this message, not consoled by it. As for the borrowed imagery: the vision does speak Babylon's visual language, but as an act of confrontation, planting the LORD's throne, rolling and sovereign, in the conquerors' own front yard. And the book proposes its own test in 2:5: whether they hear or refuse, 'they will know that there has been a prophet among them.' The book presents its warnings as fulfilled. None of this compels faith, but the coping-mechanism theory fails to explain the actual text: a pre-disaster vision carrying an anti-consolation message that its first audience did not want.
The key move the group should make: check the date. The vision precedes the temple's destruction by seven years, and Ezekiel's early message is the opposite of comfort. A community inventing a coping story does not invent a prophet who tells them their last hope will burn. The borrowed Babylonian imagery is real, and it works as defiance, not surrender: the throne of the God of Israel rolling through Babylon's home territory.
8. The chapter ends with one sentence about Ezekiel himself: 'when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking' (1:28). Why might the book end its opening vision there, and what does his reaction tell us that a description of the throne could not?
Ground. Ask when they last encountered something that made explanation feel beside the point.
Depth. Ask what it means that the vision produces worship before it produces instruction, and whether that order is reversible.
Two things worth landing. First, the posture: the only appropriate response to the glory is on the floor, and Ezekiel, a priest trained in how to behave around holy things, does not describe himself as studying the vision but as flattened by it. The vision is not information he processes; it is a Presence that puts him down. Second, the ending is deliberately unfinished. The last clause opens a door: a voice begins to speak, and the chapter stops. Ezekiel has been given a throne and not yet a message. That is exactly where the group should leave tonight, because next week is what the voice says. If someone has read ahead and wants to tell everyone, thank them warmly and ask them to keep it.
Open questions. Let these land in silence if they need to.
1. Once this week, read Psalm 137 slowly and pray it on behalf of anyone you know who feels exiled from the life they expected.
2. Each day, name one 'Chebar' in your life, the most ordinary or godforsaken-feeling place in your routine, and pray one sentence there: 'Lord, open the heavens here.'
3. At Mass this Sunday, at the consecration, remember Ezekiel falling on his face before the glory, and let your posture, inside or out, answer the same Presence.
4. Memorize this week's verse; say it once each morning before you look at your phone.
Lord God, your throne is not bolted to any floor, and your glory is not stopped by any border. Thank you that you came to your people in the place of their defeat. Come to us in ours. Where we have decided you are absent, open the heavens. Teach us to fall on our faces before we start explaining, and bring us back next week ready to hear what the voice says. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Every passage used in this session, in order. Print this page and keep it in front of you.