We have the image set before us of an errant and rebellious teenager rejecting the rules of the family home and the statutes of their parents. They’ve abused and hurt their siblings, they fly into unpredictable and uncontrolled rages, and possibly have an unresolved drug problem; and the final straw, they’re absolutely unrepentant--they are unceremoniously chucked out of home, and only allowed to return home when they’re prepared to mend their ways. The final act leaves the teen on the street in a totally foreign and very threatening environment.
This is approximately similar to what the exiles of Judah must have felt when they were finally and comprehensively carried off by the Babylonians into exile from Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. They’d been warned by prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the latter carried off ten years earlier as part of the Jehoiachin’s Deportation.[1] Ezekiel continued to prophesy in exile for his contemporaries to repent, but his countrymen and women did not heed his graphic warnings--the rest, as they say, is history. The Judean’s were carried off finally by Nebuchadnezzar.
Imagine the shock of this once holy nation; God’s chosen having been rejected by him. Certainly, however, the intent of Psalm 137 is indignance at the Babylonians and Edomites, and a prayer to God for him to bring them to eventual ruin--for God to ‘remember’ them in his holy judgment.
Remembrance is the thread of the psalm. The Judean’s are forced to remember the joy they felt (and agonisingly so) when singing the songs of Zion; they are also forced to imagine what life would like if they forgot the LORD, their God. And there is the irony. This is exactly the reason they ended up in exile--they sinned against God. How tragic to finally recall what not to do when it is all together too late! Regret is the emotion in one word.
But how would they have felt? They suddenly found themselves, dreadfully so, in a foreign land and totally captive to not only a hostile people, but a people of pagan means and spirituality at best. They were taunted as a people, by the rivers of Babylon, to sings songs of joy when all they would have felt is shattering sorrow.
But the clincher is this. Jerusalem was the home of the LORD. By leaving they could not experience God, commune with him, or worship him. They were totally estranged from the Rock of their salvation; the basis of their knowledge of being.
Going back to the beginning, I wonder how our teenager feels exiled from the family home. I wonder what sort of judgment they might be praying for. I wonder if they would sing songs of communal lamentation like the Judean exiles did, to remember Zion. (What would be the teen’s ‘Zion’?) To sing songs of joy in Babylon would have been a betrayal against the LORD.[2] So we can see quite plainly, lamentation (recalling an entire book is devoted to this in the Old Testament) was an incredibly loyal and faithful part of the liturgy for the exiles toward their God, Yahweh.
What about the 21st Century exile? Do they remember the parents; do they mourn for home? Do they think of a return? Is this a necessary part of ‘the journey’ as it was for the Judean exiles? Who knows, but as a parent we would have to keep the door ajar wouldn’t we, hoping and praying that, as the Judean exiles did, our child might repent and turn from their hazardous ways. Our open arms should always remain.
Copyright © 2008, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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