Just as the central event in Israel's early story was the Exodus experience, the latter part of Israel's story is dominated by the experience of Babylonian exile. Exodus comes out of the experience of oppression and dispossession, but exile reflects the tragic results of Israel's attempts to manipulate the blessings and to overturn the covenant. In both Exodus and exile, God's grace has a further word to say, but it takes a different shape in the midst of the judgment of exile. It is to the shape of hope in the midst of judgment that we turn our attention in this article.
The path to exile is one in which the call to covenant obedience is constantly weakened or displaced by the temptations of the royal model, which we discussed earlier in the series (see "Like the Other Nations," Sojourners, August 1984). Idolatry and nationalized religion challenge and attempt to control the Yahweh-centered faith of covenant. Justice and righteousness are not served in the relations between neighbors. The gulf between wealthy and poor grows greater. Worship of the covenant God in the face of these realities becomes hypocrisy.
As we have seen, the classical prophets confronted Israel in these matters and championed the covenant way. The great prophet of the period leading up to the exile was Jeremiah. His preaching began in 626 B.C. and only ended after Jerusalem was destroyed in 587.
In his early ministry, Jeremiah spoke of God's judgment on idolatry and lack of covenant justice in a manner similar to earlier prophets. But in 621 an unusual thing happened. A law book was discovered while repairs were being made on the temple, and on hearing its words the young king Josiah launched an extensive covenant renewal program (2 Kings 22-23). That law book was the Book of Deuteronomy. It is a book of sermons and laws spelling out the covenant understanding and its implementation in terms appropriate to the time of Jeremiah and Josiah. Many of its passages are still among the clearest statements of the demands that covenant makes on God's people.
For a brief time, under Josiah, the possibility existed for a renewed, covenant-shaped Israel, but Josiah was killed in battle in 609. His covenant reforms did not outlast him, since he was succeeded by short-sighted and greedy kings. Jeremiah felt forced to take up his preaching again and to denounce the patterns of idolatry, injustice, and national arrogance that reasserted themselves. ''
Increasingly Jeremiah saw conquest and exile as the potential judgment on Israelis, sin. He denounced those who cry, "Peace, peace, when there is no peace" (Jeremiah 6:14, 8:11), refusing recognize the dangers. He preached against those who seemed to feel some privileged protection because Jerusalem had the temple of the Lord, as if God were the possession of Israel (Jeremiah 7).
In Jeremiah's confessions (for example, 15:10-21, 17:14-18, 20:7-18) we see his pain in bringing the message of judgment that he feels compelled to bring. To speak the confronting Word of God can never be a matter of glib self-righteousness. It is because Jeremiah loves and identifies with Israel that his preaching of judgment is both necessary and painful.
Unfortunately the kings and leaders of Jeremiah's time pursued policies based on national pride and assumed God would protect Israel from the consequences of these policies. It was not to be so. In 597 a Babylonian army laid siege to Jerusalem. Jerusalem surrendered, and a first group of exiles was taken away to Babylon. In 587 when the leaders of Jerusalem became convinced God would restore the nation to its deserved greatness, the Babylonian army was forced to return. This time the Babylonians were not inclined to mercy.
The Meaning of Exile
In 587 a Babylonian army broke through the walls of Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, reduced the city to rubble, and carried all the kingdom's prominent citizens into exile (2 Kings 25). It is hard to overstate the devastating impact of this catastrophe. Modern readers tend to think of Babylonian exile mainly in terms of geography, but for Israel exile was a cultural, political, and religious upheaval. It overturned all those centers of meaning Israel though were secure. Exile called into question Israel's way of life, its institutions of leadership, and even its faith. The prosperity many thought of as birthright was destroyed, the Davidic kingship ended, and the temple lay in ruins.
The mood of the exile reflected not only the pain of physical suffering but the hopelessness of despair and anger. Psalm 137 best captures that mood:
By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
How shall we sing the Lord's song
in a strange land?
The implied answer to the psalmist's question is that they cannot sing the Lord's song.
Indeed many thought God had abandoned them (Lamentations 5:19-22). God had not abandoned Israel, but the prophets were all agreed that God had judged Israel. "Who gave up Jacob to the spoiler, and Israel to the robbers? Was it not the Lord, against whom we have sinned, in whose ways they would not walk, and whose law they would not obey?" Isaiah 42:24).
God had not willfully forsaken Israel. The catastrophe was related to Israel's own arrogance, injustice, and unfaithfulness. God judged such sin even in God's own people. They had no special privilege or immunity.
The modern church has not often chosen to think of itself in terms of the exile image. This is partly because we limit our understanding of exile to the geographic. The fate of the Israelite exiles seems to us a happening possible only in ancient times and therefore treated as irrelevant.
But even when we understand exile more broadly as an upheaval in whole patterns of living and meaning, we still find the theme of judgment experienced as catastrophe a hard one to consider. No one wishes to believe that catastrophic experiences will befall them, and even fewer wish to believe that their own behavior will help bring a catastrophic fate upon them. On first glance the theme of exile seems like such a negative theme.
Nevertheless, we live in a time when famine, nuclear war, and major environmental damage are all disasters that are possible in our lifetimes. We live on a planet increasingly over-populated, and on which many of those peoples who have lived in poverty are asking for a just share of the earth's wealth. Increasingly, we see signs that the unlimited consumption and general prosperity that most Americans have enjoyed will not always be possible in a limited world. In such world it is very likely that we shall go through upheavals that challenge our accepted patterns of life, meaning, and faith.
In effect, we too face the possibility of exile. Ours will not be a geographic removal, but it will be a strange land unlike what we have known—the strange land of our own future.
We have not raised the image of exile just to sound a gloomy note. Precisely the opposite. It is in the context of exile that we find biblical resources for moving from despair, resignation, and guilt to hope and renewal. If our time shares much in common with the period of Israel's exile, then the central question for the church today may also be the question of the psalmist, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" How can God's word be understood in a time when our accustomed way of life is coming apart?
This was the central question that occupied the great prophets of the exile when that catastrophe became reality. It has always been remarkable that the boldest messages of hope in the Old Testament come from that time of greatest-hopelessness among the people, the Babylonian exile. After the destruction of Jerusalem, Jeremiah turned his preaching to themes of comfort and hope for a new covenant (Jeremiah 31). Ezekiel, carried off in the first deportation, spoke of God's presence with the people even in Babylon (Ezekiel 1) and of new life in dry bones (Ezekiel 37). An anonymous prophet of the exile whom we call only Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55) sang the most eloquent hymns of hope contained in the Old Testament, "Comfort, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord" (Isaiah 40:1).
Singing the Lord's Song
Biblical hope is not founded in rational assessment of options. It is instead the confidence that even when all the options seem disastrous, the last word, which comes from God, has not been spoken. Here we can only comment on some of the forms of hope suggested in the biblical witness. They may help provide some guide for the forms of hope the church might seek in our own time.
Hope is memory. The community of faith has always been a community of hope because it is never left with just its own present resources. Over and over again in hopeless situations, the Old Testament writers evoked images out of the past that called forth trust that the future also belonged to God. The Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves reminds us that "in the Biblical world, one hopes for the future because one has already seen the creative event taking place in the past."
The prophet of Second Isaiah says,
Look to the rock from which you were hewn,
and to the quarry from which you were digged.
Look to Abraham your father
and to Sarah who bore you.
—Isaiah 5: 1b-2a
Over and over again the community of faith draws hope from its memory of God's work. In this form hope is the antidote to rootlessness. Memory protects the church from the lack of identity that tempts it simply to be a chameleon church, taking on the coloration of its cultural surroundings, as many in hopelessness were swallowed up in the Babylonian surroundings of exile. The church must be wary that memory does not grow dim and hope thus remain formless in our time.
Hope is also posterity. In the Old Testament, hope was not narrowly limited to the benefits one desired in the scope of a lifetime. Biblical hope is the ability to see that God's future stretches beyond one's own generation. It is particularly important in the age of the here-and-now generation to recover this important biblical vision. Many have despaired at the inability of this generation to look beyond its immediate self-interest to make decisions which lay the foundations for the peace and well-being of generations yet unborn.
The church might do well to explore its own tradition for resources at this point. Recovery of this aspect of hope as posterity would cut against the excessive individualism that measures the impact of ethical decisions only on one's own life or, at the broadest, one's own nation. In Jeremiah's letter to the exiles, he writes:
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters... When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.
(Jeremiah 29:4-6,10)
Jeremiah was advising these exiles that hope would not reach full fruition in their own lifetime. Their hope lay in part in future generations for whom they must now live faithfully. For the most part, the Hebrews rejected the notion of individual immortality in favor of a concept of corporate posterity. The goal of faithful life was the furtherance of faithful generations to come after, not the achievement of individual reward in the life to come. Covenant included solidarity with the past experience of the community and responsibility for future generations.
Hope is forgiveness as well. When we acknowledge and confess our own judgment, we can then hear the word of God's forgiveness. Second Isaiah opens his great hymn of hope: "Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins" (Isaiah 40:1-2). Hope springs from the knowledge that we are forgiven and loved by God in spite of our failures to serve the divine will.
It is hope as forgiveness that frees us from guilt. Many who realize that we in our church and society have contributed to the brokenness of our world are paralyzed by guilt or forced to deny our complicity in order to escape guilt. Judgment does riot call for guilt but repentance. Guilt is oriented to the past and paralyzes persons in regret for things that cannot be changed.
The Hebrew word for repent is shuv, which means "to turn around." It points to a changing of direction and to new, creative action. The church in our time must learn from the experience of exile that it cannot afford to be paralyzed by guilt. It should instead witness to God's forgiveness, which has already made creative response possible.
Hope is new creation and new life. In contrast to the upheavals and confusion that often accompany the experience of judgment and exile, hope has a joyful and affirming character. In this aspect hope drives out resignation and despair. In the crisis of judgment, defeat seems total. The task of the church as the community of hope is like that of the prophets of exile: to declare paradoxically that the very same moment of apparent defeat is one of new creation and rebirth to new life.
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth…
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength…
But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
—Isaiah 40:28, 29, 31
What does it mean to "wait for the Lord"? From what quarter will this new strength come? The community of faith is to be constantly alert to creative and life-giving possibilities, even in chaotic and death-dealing situations. It is there that God's hopeful activity is to be found, and there that we are to join it.
This openness to God's leading may take us into some surprising places. Second Isaiah declared to the exiles that the instrument of God's salvation, God's anointed one (Hebrew, messiah), was Cyrus, the pagan king of Persia (Isaiah 45:1-6). This must have been a shock to his hearers. But the prophet reminds them that our God is free and sovereign over all history. Like the exiles, the modern church serves this God of all history, must scan the horizon alert to the hopeful presence of God wherever it may be found. We can be certain that it will not always be in institutionally approved settings.
In our time both chaos and death, the opponents of creation and life, work their power. Chaos appears in the confusion, anxiety, and disorder that paralyzes action. Death is the sense of separation, alienation, and brokenness that leads to resignation and despair. But the biblical message of hope is that God constantly defeats both chaos and death to make available to us new creation and new life. The lifestyle of the community of hope is characterized by the mood of Habakkuk 3:17-18:
Though the fig trees do not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.
Finally, hope is eschatological vision. Biblical hope is not encompassed in the planning of programs, strategies, and evaluations. These are surely necessary in the church's response to the challenges of our broken world, but if these activities are not fired by the vision of God's future in its fullness, then they will be in vain.
There is an element of hope that is not practical in any immediate sense. God's people have always been fired with a vision impossible of earthly achievement, and they have known it. The future, whatever their efforts, was God's. In the Old Testament, this vision is richly encompassed in the eschatological visions, which inspired faithful labor in the present, even in exile, by revealing the fullness of God's future.
For you shall go out in joy,
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
—Isaiah 55:12
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
—Isaiah 2:4
This visionary aspect of hope is the remedy for the narrow pragmatism that often afflicts church response to great issues.
Like all human institutions, the church is afflicted with a desire for institutional success. But as God's faithful community, we are called to on behalf of a vision that is impossible and foolhardy by human standards. We are called to live as witnesses and agents of God's future.
Rootlessness, individualism, guilt, resignation, despair, and narrow pragmatism—these are the enemies of hope. They were present in the midst of Babylonian exile; they are present in the church today. But as the prophets discovered, we are not without resources in the richness of our biblical faith. Our faith requires only the decision to declare our commitment to the task of becoming communities of hope who can sing the Lord's song as faithfully as did Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Second Isaiah.
Behold My Servant
We must touch upon one final theme out of the exile experience. Four passages are found in the preaching of Second Isaiah that witness to a figure called "the servant of the Lord." These servant songs (Isaiah 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-9, 52:13-53:12) give us a new image for faithfulness to God's calling. In the image of servant, Israel was summoned to new understandings of its vocation and its suffering, the early church found a way to understand the messiahship of one whose kingdom was established through suffering and death, and we are called to new tasks as the servant church willing to lose its life in order to save it.
Much has been written on the servant songs. We can do little more here than to suggest their richness and urge their study as a model for the lifestyle of the church in our own time. We will only briefly comment on the mission of the servant, the scope of his mission, and the lifestyle of servanthood.
The mission of the servant is to establish justice. Three times in the first servant song this is made clear. The servant's mission thus reflects the two-fold nature of the covenantal word, "justice" (mishpat). To those who look to God for help, justice brings hope, but to those who resist and oppose God's rule, justice becomes judgment and confrontation. The servant is to be the instrument of God's justice.
The scope of the servant's mission is universal. It is not simply directed to Israel, but to the nations, to the ends of the earth. This is made especially clear in the second servant song: "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth" (Isaiah 49:6). The servant's task is not to a narrow confessing group but to all peoples.
Finally, the lifestyle of the servant is one of willingness to suffer for the sake of the mission. The way of servanthood will not be the way of earthly power. Instead, "a bruised reed he will not break" (Isaiah 42:2). The mission will lead him to be abused and scorned (Isaiah 50:4-9), but as the fourth servant song makes especially clear, it is the servant's willing suffering that is redemptive. "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole (shalom), and with his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5).
This picture of the servant is an Old Testament witness to the paradox of the gospel of weakness and suffering become power and victory. It is little wonder that the New Testament community saw in Jesus Christ the fullest expression of this servant role. In the prophet's time, these servant songs were already summoning the community to servanthood as a faithful response to God's word. Today they live anew in addressing us with the call to become the servant church.
Bruce C. Birch was professor of Old Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared.
This is part five in a six-part series on the Old Testament roots of our faith, published regularly in 1984.
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