Sacramental Living

During the 40-days journey of Lent, I’m revisiting a theological construct that I have grappled with for several years: exile. In so many ways, I am experiencing exile these days. In my journey with Jesus … My local tribe’s plight to be with Jesus by infusing justice into our community … My servant-leader mentality of ministry that upsets so many “establishment” notions of what a pastor is supposed to be.

So, I’ll post several times throughout Lent some of my study and analysis of this thing called exile.

What is exile, both historically and theologically? What were the various responses to exile? How do answers to the two previous questions speak into the condition of exile experienced by the contemporary church today and provide possible responses to this current exile?

Let us begin with a description of exile. The historical event of exile for the people of Judah, or the Southern Kingdom of the twelve Biblical tribes of Israel, began in 597 BCE and completed in 587 BCE. In 597 BCE the national and religious leaders were exiled to Babylon by the Babylonian king Nebucheddnezer.

Nebucheddnezer installed a puppet king, Zedekiah, in Jerusalem to carry out the wishes of the Babylonian empire and maintain Judah as a loyal vassal state. However, Zedekiah attempted to form an alliance with the Egyptian Pharaoh, Psammetichus, in order to free Judah from Babylon’s dominion.

This unwise–and Yahweh-forbidden–decision resulted in the almost complete exile of the inhabitants of Judah to Babylon and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. These are the actual events that resulted in a literal exile for the people of Israel. The people were removed from their land, losing their national identity, their religious identity, in brief, their space.

The Hebrew word for exile is galah — literally “to strip naked or bare.” This then becomes the foundation for a transhistorical and theological understanding of exile. The people in Babylonian exile were stripped of everything they knew; it was indeed the death of God as they understood God. The Babylonian exile lasted over a generation 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.

Exile is also something that must be chosen, in as far as, 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.

SO TELL ME SOMETHING:
What is your general understanding of exile?

——

Brian Niece
www.brianniece.com
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Related Posts:

• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile – Part 2
• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile – Part 5
• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile – Conclusion
• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile – Part 4
• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile – Part 3