Tag Archive - exile

Advent and the End of Exile

December 20, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

Matthew begins his narrative with quite the gripping tale. If it takes well-meaning, would-be readers of the Old Testament several weeks before they get mired in seemingly jumbled laws and endless genealogies, it takes their New Testament counterparts all of ten seconds.

Jesus is the son of David, the son of Abraham–and we get 20+ generations of genealogy to prove it.

But entailed in this genealogy is a story: a story of God’s promises. God has promised a king from the line of David, and God has promised a full restoration of the people–an end to the age of exile.

There was an age of Abraham; there was an age of David; and there was an age of exile (Matthew 1:17). But now the age of the messiah is dawning.

What God had promised to Israel is coming to fruition in Christ. What exile was supposed to do, but didn’t, will now be realized.

“You will call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21, CEB).

Of course, this is what the prophet had long ago declared, but which had not yet been realized:

Comfort, comfort my people!
says your God.
Speak compassionately to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her that her
compulsory service has ended,
that her penalty has been paid,
that she has received
from the LORD ’s hand
double for all her sins! (Isa 40:1-2, CEB)

The exile was insufficient to pay for the people’s sins. So not only did the exile endure, so did the sins which were its cause.

Advent is the beginning of the end, the beginning of the age of the Messiah, the beginning of the restoration from exile.

Israel’s story is coming to its culmination.

Or, if you prefer the words of hymnody:

O come, o come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here–
until the son of God appear.

No Place Like Home

October 29, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

I travel a good bit these days. I’m in a hotel in Irvine right now, heading out in a few minutes to teach a class. I’ll be in Sacramento on Wednesday.

By disposition, I’d rather be at home. Give me the choice between scurrying around to get family together to go out, or leave things with a baby sitter, and stay home, I’ll probably choose stay home most of the time. I like the comfort. I like getting my sleep.

I like the larger sense of home, too. All of our family is on the east coast. I would love to spend special occasions with them. When we were in NC, it didn’t take much: birthday, mothers day, fathers day. My mom’s side of the family is big into the family gathering.

I miss the larger sense of home that we don’t get to participate in because we live in CA.

But there is something good in all this discomforting wandering.

Some significant metaphors that biblical writers use for God’s people are sojourners, exiles, the dispersed. Here we encounter the flip side of the here-and-now-arriving Kingdom of God: there is a not here and future kingdom as well, a “heavenly home” that is ours that is not this place where we find ourselves.

Much of what I do, much of the energy that inspires my day-to-day life, is geared toward making this place more like home, seeking out the comforts and protections of home, or even simply longing for a sort of home here that I do not currently have.

And in my life, and in our society, I and we do a pretty good job at it. But at a cost.

In the upside economy of the kingdom of God, to be less at home here is to be more truly embodying the reality of our heavenly citizenship. We are sojourners in this land, yes called to be a blessing to the city where God has called us, but sojourners nonetheless.

And so when I travel, when I sleep in the hotel room that’s a mirror image of the one I slept in last time I was here and wonder at the absurdity of it all, I have enough disorientation to catch a truer glimpse of my life. Even when I am home, sleeping in my own bed, I am not at home, but a traveler. I should not get too comfortable here, or cling to tightly, or bind myself too closely with this one place.

The longing I feel for home is good. It is good to feel it when I’m in a strange city. But it’s also good to feel it when I’m in my own.

(Thoughts on the difficulties of recognizing ourselves as sojourners inspired by Joel Green, Practicing Theological Interpretation)

Exile? Between Text and History

April 26, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

Last week I posted some reflections on the Wheaton Theology Conference centered on the work of N. T. Wright.

I mentioned in a previous post that I find myself somewhere between Hays and Wright on the question of history and text: do we read the text as a window into a world behind it, or do we read the text itself as the theological witness to which we are committed?

I tend to prefer the latter (with Hays): the canon of the church is not the “historical Jesus” but the texts which bear witness to his ministry. This, in fact, seemed to be much the same point as Scot McKnight made in the April cover story of Christianity Today.

But, I also want to read those texts with historical integrity; that is, to do our best to understand sufficient amounts of the various contexts and pressures that stand behind the texts that we approach a viable understanding of what the ideal author might have intended for an ideal reader to understand. This is where I started to get a bit uncomfortable with incarnation as a hermeneutic for the gospels.

As I pondered this, I wondered if Wright’s insistence on the importance of “return from exile” might not be an important instance where the distinction between historical Jesus (Wright’s aim in JVG) and historically sensitive reading of the text (my goal) comes into play.

Wright insists through JVG that Israel still considered itself in exile. And I think there is something to this in the ways that they express their hopes for restoration; but I do wonder if Sanders’s “restoration eschatology” isn’t a better way of expressing things.

But the most important consideration, it seems to me, is not whether the Jew on the street in the first century would have understood Jesus and John the Baptist as offering “return from exile,” but that both Matthew and Mark invite us to so interpret Jesus’ ministry by the way they tell their stories.

When Mark begins by telling us that the beginning of the Gospel is that foretold in Isa 40, he is setting a framework for reading the entirety of Jesus’ ministry under the rubric of the fulfillment of Israel’s hopes of glorious return from exile.

Similarly, when Matthew so outlines the history of Israel that the final period in Jesus’ genealogy is “from the Babylonian exile to the birth of Jesus the Messiah,” we are being told that the period defined by that exile is coming to a close.

Of course, this raises some important questions, such as the way that this expectation itself might be subverted in the course of the narrative (as Marianne Meye Thompson pointed out in her lecture at the conference).

For example: What happens to the promise of “return from exile” when Jesus in the Temple says that the time in which the temple is located is not the time of Isaiah’s glorious restoration (“my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations”) but rather in Jeremiah’s time immediately antecedent to exile (you’ve made it a “robbers den”)?

But the important point that Wright has established is that we have to recognize the narrative theme of return from exile. And this is the case even if it wasn’t in the mind of the historical Jesus or his friends–because it opens up a better, historically situated reading of the texts we’re reading.

Failure of Exile and Theological Interpretation (4)

February 23, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

In the first forays we took in to 1st Isaiah’s expectations of return from exile, I suggested that Isaiah proclaims an expectation that the exile itself will be purifying and atoning for the people’s sins. Moreover, I advocated reading 2d and 3d Isaiah as responses, at least in part, to the failure of these prophecies. The people was not transformed, did not get their new hearts, and come to think of it didn’t get a glorious restoration, either. There was a historical (and theological?) problem that generated creative reengagement with the prophecies. The old narrative was transformed in light of the current circumstance.

One conviction necessary for such reworking is tied to Israel’s understanding of God. It’s not simply that YHWH really is God, or that the true God will always be faithful and true, but that God’s identity is wrapped up with the people to whom he has bound his name.

God is not true in the abstract, God is true to Israel. Thus, to echo yesterday’s post, the question is not, “Why, O Lord?” but “How long, O Lord?” Or, if you’re a prophet, “Yet a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth, says the Lord…”

Last time, reflected on how the lingering failure of the promised restoration enables the Gospel writers to renarrate the hoped-for renewal. John’s is the voice of Isaiah 40, and Jesus the agent of God’s promised deliverance. Isaiah’s promises of transformation can only be read through that climactic episode in the story.

And yet, the church today does not look like that gloriously restored people. We claim to have the Spirit that adopts us as God’s children, and yet we do not live out the “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” We claim to be indwelt by the Spirit who at last enables us to be transformed from the inside out–to become those heart-circumcised people who are obedience to God, and yet we do not perfectly obey God (or even, very often, show forth the sort of systematic obedience that might distinguish us from the world).

Between resurrection and return of Jesus we find ourselves in the peculiar position of having to say both that the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision has arrived in the unexpected guise of a crucified and risen messiah; and, at the same time, that we await the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision when the heavenly Zion comes down as the capital city of the new earth.

Christians must renarrate the story for our moment. We must reread Isaiah in light of Jesus and say that he is the means for fulfillment. And we must reread its hopes for the future in light of the New Testament’s already/not-yet eschatology.

1st Isaiah was speaking about us, but about who we’ve only begun to be and who we will fully be only in the future. And living faithfully in light of Isaiah’s vision will depend upon our willingness to serve a God whose means for bringing His story to its telos are always open to surprising turns in response to His people. It is a Christian reading only if it recognizes that the God who spoke through Isaiah speaks also in the surprising continuation of the story in Christ, in the sometimes baffling continuance of it in the church by the power of the Spirit, and who will speak its “Amen” yet sometime in the future.

The inherent paradox in a Christian hermeneutic of the OT is captured for me by Martin Buber, as I quoted yesterday in one of the comments: “To the Jew the Christian is the incomprehensibly daring man who affirms in an unredeemed world that its redemption has been accomplished.” (M. Buber, “The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,” in Jewish Perspectives on Christianity, ed. F. Rothschild, p. 131.)

Yes, “already accomplished”–and that as the prophets foretold, whether they knew it or not.