Whitewashed Ozymandius

Bill Brown .... Xiamen University
"When the wall collapses, will people not ask you, 'Where is the whitewash you covered it with?'" Ezekiel 13:12 NIV

"My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Percy Bysshe Shelly, 1817

I love to visit the ancient walled village of Chongwu, on the coast north of Quanzhou. It's hard to imagine that those walls were there long before my own country was even settled by Europeans. The walls have been rebuilt and repaired countless times, but they're still there, as are the descendants of the people who first built them. But many things built today are ready to fall down, or be replaced, within a decade (and not just in China).

Ezekiel spoke of flimsy city walls built for defense being covered by whitewash to disguise their shoddy construction. I suppose that analogy could apply to many things in life, but in this case Ezekiel was talking about prophets who proclaim the "word of the Lord," when in fact they were voicing only their own words. This angered our Father on two counts. One, they lied, claiming that God had said things he did not, and gave people a false sense of comfort that was no more secure than a whitewashed shoddy wall. Two, while speaking lies, they failed to speak the truth, and warn people to change the behavior that was leading them into the danger from which their white-washed walls would not protect them.

Jesus spoke of religious hypocrites being "whitewashed graves" (Matthew 23:27), beautiful outside but inside filled with rotting bones. In the same way, entire cultures and civilizations, though grand in appearance, may be whitewashed walls, ready to fall at the first onslaught of a foreign army, or a stock market tumble (who'd have thought a year ago that Iceland's government would completely fail?).

When we drove 40,000 Km. around China in 1994, to Tibet and back, one thing that impressed me was how we kept running into the Great Wall, from the coast way out into the Gobi Desert. And it is still impressive, stretching for thousands of miles, but much of it is now just mounds, barely distinguishable from the Gobi sand dunes.

In the end, even Great Walls fall. It is all the more reason to make sure that our lives, and our nations, are built upon the right foundation--and even then, to pay more heed to values, visions and works of eternal significance.

Ozymandius

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

First Published in 1817
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I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

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