Catholic Commentary
The Sign of the Sighing Prophet
6“Therefore sigh, you son of man. You shall sigh before their eyes with a broken heart and with bitterness.7It shall be, when they ask you, ‘Why do you sigh?’ that you shall say, ‘Because of the news, for it comes! Every heart will melt, all hands will be feeble, every spirit will faint, and all knees will be weak as water. Behold, it comes, and it shall be done, says the Lord Yahweh.’”
Ezekiel 21:6–7 commands the prophet to groan with a broken heart before the exiles as a sign-act announcing imminent catastrophic judgment on Jerusalem. God instructs Ezekiel to embody the emotional and physical devastation to come, demonstrating through his own visible anguish the total collapse of human strength and resistance that will overtake the people when the news arrives.
God doesn't ask the prophet to announce judgment—He asks him to embody it, transforming Ezekiel's broken body into a living sign of divine anguish.
Ezekiel 21:6 — "Sigh, you son of man… with a broken heart"
The Hebrew word translated "sigh" (אָנַח, 'anach) carries the weight of groaning under an unbearable burden — the same root appears in Lamentations 1:4 to describe Jerusalem herself mourning her desolation. Crucially, God does not merely tell Ezekiel to announce judgment; He commands him to embody it. This is a formal prophetic sign-act (māšāl in its enacted form), a device Ezekiel employs more than any other prophet: he has already lain on his side for 390 days (Ezek 4), shaved his head (Ezek 5), and packed an exile's bag (Ezek 12). Each act was a living parable preceding and accompanying the spoken oracle.
The qualifier "with a broken heart" (literally, "with the breaking of the loins" or "with shattered hips" in some manuscript traditions) is physiologically vivid. Ancient Near Eastern idiom located deep emotion — grief, dread, anguish — in the torso and kidneys rather than the chest alone. Ezekiel is not to perform a ritual show of sadness; he is to groan from the depths of his physical and spiritual being, before their eyes, in full public view. The phrase "before their eyes" (לְעֵינֵיהֶם) is a repeated marker in Ezekiel emphasizing that the exiles in Babylon are the audience. They must see the prophet's body break in order to grasp what is about to happen to their city.
Ezekiel 21:7 — "Because of the news, for it comes!"
When the exiles demand an explanation — "Why do you sigh?" — Ezekiel is to answer with a declaration that has the force of a thunderclap: "Because of the news, for it comes!" The Hebrew šᵉmûʿāh (שְׁמוּעָה, "news" or "report") anticipates the devastating word of Jerusalem's fall, which reaches the exiles only in Ezekiel 33:21. The entire section from chapter 21 onward is prologue to that moment.
What follows is a cascade of physiological terror: melting hearts, feeble hands, fainting spirits, knees dissolving "as water." This fourfold collapse of the human body under fear is not rhetorical exaggeration; it is a precise anatomy of acute dread. In the ancient world, the "heart" (lēb) was the seat of courage and resolve; "hands" represented capacity to act and defend; "spirit" (rûaḥ) was the animating force of the self; and "knees" carried the weight of standing firm. When all four fail simultaneously, the person is utterly undone — incapable of resistance, decision, or flight. Ezekiel paints a picture of total, systemic collapse.
The oracle closes with a double emphasis of absolute certainty — "Behold, it comes, and it shall be done, says the Lord Yahweh." The doubled verb (bā'āh… nɛʾāsâh, "it comes… it is done") collapses the future into a present reality. God's word does not merely predict; it enacts. In the prophetic imagination of Ezekiel, the utterance of Yahweh is inseparable from the event itself.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the allegorical sense, Ezekiel sighing before the exiles prefigures Christ weeping before the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35) and over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41) — the Word made flesh who takes human grief into His divine Person. In both cases, God's representative feels the consequence of sin before the judgment is executed. In the anagogical sense, the prophet's broken-hearted groan points to the Church's penitential grief, the compunctio cordis (piercing of heart) that patristic writers identify as the beginning of true conversion.
Catholic tradition reads the prophetic sign-act with particular richness because it anticipates the sacramental logic at the heart of the Church's life: the outward, bodily sign genuinely communicates and participates in the inward, spiritual reality it signifies. Ezekiel's sighing body is not a mere illustration of a verbal message; it is the message, enacted in flesh. This foreshadows what the Catechism teaches about sacramental economy: "The sacraments are perceptible signs (words and actions) accessible to our human nature" that "make present the graces they signify" (CCC 1084). The prophet's body, offered as a living sign of divine sorrow, is a distant type of the Incarnation itself, wherein God's grief over sin takes permanent bodily form in the Person of His Son.
St. Gregory the Great, commenting on Ezekiel in his Homiliae in Hiezechihelem, dwells extensively on the prophet as a figure of the pastor and preacher who must himself be broken by the weight of the message before he can deliver it with authority. For Gregory, the sigh (gemitus) is not weakness but the mark of authentic spiritual leadership: "He who preaches the word of God must first feel within himself what he urges upon others." The preacher who has not wept cannot call others to compunction.
St. Thomas Aquinas connects this passage to the virtue of poenitentia (penance), noting that the external expression of interior grief — the groan, the bodily posture — is not superfluous but completes and manifests the interior act (cf. Summa Theologiae III, q. 85). The Catechism, drawing on this tradition, teaches that "interior penance" must be expressed outwardly (CCC 1430). Ezekiel's commanded sigh is thus a prophetic endorsement of the Catholic penitential tradition: the body must participate in the soul's grief for sin. The prophet's knees "weak as water" further recalls what the Church, following Origen and Jerome, interprets as the eschatological trembling before divine judgment — a trembling that, transformed by grace, becomes the fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10).
Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with forms of noise — social media, entertainment, perpetual distraction — that make Ezekiel's commanded sigh feel countercultural to the point of strangeness. Yet the Church has never abandoned the conviction that bodily grief over sin and suffering is spiritually necessary, not pathological. The Fridays of Abstinence, the prostration at Good Friday liturgy, the Ash Wednesday imposition of ashes — these are the Church's institutional "sighs," commanded public expressions of broken-heartedness that resist the culture's demand for relentless optimism.
Practically, this passage invites Catholics to recover what the tradition calls compunctio — the piercing grief of the heart that accompanies genuine awareness of sin and impending judgment. This is not morbidity; it is realism about the weight of what Christ bore. A confessor who hears the same sins week after week without feeling Ezekiel's groan may be administering a sacrament without inhabiting its gravity. A parent who prays for a wayward child, a priest who intercedes for a secular culture — both are called, in a real sense, to the ministry of the sigh. The fourfold collapse of verse 7 (heart, hands, spirit, knees) is also a call to humility: before God's holiness, our self-sufficiency must dissolve before we can receive His mercy.
Commentary