Exile/Return
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For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. - Nehemiah 8:9
The books of both Ezra and Nehemiah describe the time when the Israelites, after a long, long exile in Babylon, were finally allowed to return to Jerusalem. In these two books, they begin to rebuild the ruined temple and again shore up the city of Jerusalem’s crumbling walls and gates. The priests were called back, and then exiles were called back. And some of them came. Of course, after so many years away, they’d already set up their lives in other places. They’d settled into Babylon, had established farms and raised families. But the pull of Jerusalem was strong enough to bring many of them back again.
Did they find it exactly how they remembered it? After 70 years away, how could it possibly be the same? Though some things had been rebuilt, neither the temple nor the city were the same, and much of it was still in ruins. Nor were they surrounded by the same people that had been there before. Beside the fact that many had decided not to return, precious few of those who did had even been alive back when Jerusalem was the way it used to be. And, of course, they themselves had been changed by their long time away. They’d picked up a whole new culture and it was now a whole new time. So no, it was not exactly how they’d remembered it.
With our own recent time of exile from our own place of worship (albeit it far shorter than the Israelites had suffered!) perhaps we can understand how people might have felt when they gathered outside in the square and the book of the law of Moses was brought out and read publicly in Jerusalem for the first time in many decades. Nehemiah tells us the people wept. Perhaps they wept for joy. Or perhaps they were weeping with sorrow over everything they had lost. Perhaps they were grieving how it it was not the same as it used to be. Or perhaps they were weeping in worry about what on earth the future would hold for them now that they’d uprooted and come back to this strange new Jerusalem. Perhaps they were weeping for all of those reasons and more.
Like them, we are feeling the shock of realization that things will never go back to the way they used to be. Things will continue to change in ways we can’t predict, and there are all kinds of feelings wrapped up in that. The stories of our forbears in faith assure us, however, that God will always be with us.
God was not waiting back in the fallen boulders of the temple in Jerusalem for the exiles to come back. God had gone with them to Babylon, just as God had been with them wherever they went, through so many exiles and returns, through every wave of change and all times of difficulty.
And we can be sure that God is traveling with us, too.
