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The Hebrew word for exile is galah which means “to strip naked or bare.” Our ancient spiritual ancestors experienced this, and we have the strange opportunity to experience it now.
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A Brief Survey of Biblical Exile
The people in Babylonian exile were stripped of everything they knew: the death of God as they understood God. The Babylonian exile lasted over a generation–about 70 years–in which everything in the people’s understanding was annihilated and re-interpreted into a new cognition of themselves as the people of God. The stripping experience of exile was not merely an ideological stripping, but quite literally a physical stripping of more than just homeland. The experiences of other historical exiles clearly suggest that exile involved a severe and traumatic occurrence. The Babylonian exile was not comfortable.
Walter Brueggemann has noted exile is something that must be chosen, that is to say a people may be in exile but choose to deny their situational actuality. When in exile, the people must recognize they are in exile in order to return from exile. Exile articulates that the new space, where everything has been stripped from the people, is not home and can never be home because the realities are not consistent with the people’s true theological identity.
A biblical view of exile is not complete unless there is return. The remarkable fact about the Babylonian exile is that the Judean people did not vanish away as did so many other nations that underwent imposed exile. Rather, the people of Judah returned from exile under the Persian king Cyprus. The condition of the people’s return is dependent on the degree to which they have learned to live as God’s people while in exile. In exile, the people cannot depend on land, nor the nation, nor even religious practice for security. The shrine of later days must be laid by in deference to a total dependence on the divine. This dependence yields a new identity and a transforming knowledge of God.
This newness resides, however, in certain responses to the exilic condition. In the Babylonian exile we find a succession of responses that brings new life in a new community that is obedient to the covenant Yahweh has established. By responding to exile in accordance with who God is and what God wills, the previous ordering of reality for 6th-century BC Jerusalem is obliterated and replaced with a newfound relationship with God. The shame of the exilic condition, and the remembrance of what led to exile, is essential for the people to become the people of God in a new manner that surpasses the mistakes of their ancestors.
The historical and theological reality of exile in the life of our spiritual ancestors can be re-narrated, so as to appropriate this part of God’s story into what may be a desperate situation for those who follow Jesus today. If we consider the present context of the Western church, we discover we are a radically re-situated people, a displaced community, a dislocated tribe in exile among the predominant values of a society that run counter to our own. Indeed, many of us find ourselves even in exile from the institutional Western church system.
In such a context, we must find, or re-find, our identity as gathered followers.
First, Grief
Drawing again from our heritage of exile, and re-narrating that heritage accordingly, clearly there are certain appropriate responses to exile. The spectrum of right responses to exile covers the span between relinquishment and receiving. The exilic literature is designed to help the community in exile relinquish the end of the world as they have known it, thereafter receiving a new world given by God.
The path from relinquishing to receiving begins with grief. Specifically, lamentations are expressions of the community in exile. Great loss has been inflicted on this people. They have lost all but their lives in the physical world; and their entire concept of who Yahweh is and how he works must now be re-ordered. Grief must be allowed to follow the realization that God can walk away. He can do this because there is mutual relationship between God and his people; this is not a one-way covenant. The people have not determined this before. They believe his old covenant to be forever. Yet they now see that God can, and does, walk away from the covenant. Faced with this entirely new concept, the people must relinquish their hold on false notions of the past: this brings grief.
The prophet Jeremiah utters words of doom to the people while simultaneously grieving for their coming loss. To ignore the pain of grief would be a way of assimilating into the empire; a way of further losing their identity. Giving voice to the grief, crying out, keeps the people engaged with their God. Building and planting occur only after utter hopelessness at the end of destroying, overthrowing, plucking up, and tearing down.
Next, Hope
Grief gives way to a response of hope. There is hope in a new future, now that the past has been relinquished. Though God has walked away he cannot stay away. For the sake of his holiness and out of divine love and mercy he will return to his people and transform them into something altogether new. The language of hope in something new is riddled with language of the old. Yet there is a re-narrating of the old traditions, making sense of the exilic condition. In light of this re-narrating, God is seen for who he truly is: a God that is sovereign in love, a God that is still God. Hope resides in the very person of God, whose divine love wills something new for his people. Hope is found in the person of God: he is capable of transcribing an all-new understanding on the inner person of his people.
Looking toward a homecoming then becomes the metaphor for receiving God’s will. Homecoming can only follow where relinquishment has yielded acceptance of exile. The language of homecoming applies faith to hope and anticipates a social reality that does not yet exist. The prophet of 2 Isaiah aims at a new relational, covenantal reality. The people can operate in a new reality after they see afresh their cultural-spiritual circumstance. The people are guided to look beyond what is available to what might be possible now that the old standard has died. The freedom, power, and sovereignty of Yahweh make possible precisely that which appears impossible. By remembering the triumphs of God in the past and re-narrating these in the contemporary reality, the people can look into the face of the impossible and call it possible.
So, we who are in exile can only live a progressive, genuinely human life when we accept our exile (let go of what was), grieve (mourn the loss), and look toward hope (a distinctly different future).
We must allow for brokenness as reality, though we will find pain and hardship. Out of this pain will flow grief over the loss of old ideologies and deluded notions of security.
From grief grows the possibility for newness.