HOME AT LAST!
The Stirrings of God: Part Three (4) 1:1-11
“the LORD stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia . . . everyone whose spirit God had stirred” (1:1, 5). . “I have aroused Cyrus in righteousness; . . , he shall . . . set my exiles free” (Isa. 45:13).
II. God stirred up the spirits of “the heads of the families of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites”
Introduction
In Ezra-Nehemiah our attention has been given to a people in exile and God’s dealing with them. In our time we do not see many people of one nation taken by another and removed en mass to another country. But the phrase “in exile” applies as well to those who are refugees in a country other than their own, and we read daily of many such people in our world. I read recently that the parents of Helen Mirren, of “The Queen” fame, were Russians in exile in Britain at the time of the Russian revolution. We have probably all met some of the “Lost Boys.” So this week I sent my friend “Google” after “refugee.” Statistics at the close of 2005 vary. Apart from Internally Displaced Persons the figures I found varied from 12 million to 8.4 million refuges worldwide. In the Middle East there are 4,855,000 refugees, in Europe there 530,200, and the United States with 550,000 is fifth after Pakistan, Germany, Iran, and Tanzania in the number of refugees harbored. The modern refugee problem is overwhelming. How is God dealing with these folk? What is he doing on their behalf? Will be there be a Cyrus for them?
Now back to the sixth century B. C. and to Ezra 1:1-11 and the situation of the Jewish exiles in Babylon. Walter Brueggemann, writing about Isaiah 40-55 in his stimulating Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile, catches our attention as he comments that the use of the two metaphors,
exile and homecoming, is an act of remarkable evangelical imagination. The homecoming metaphor makes sense only where the metaphor of exile has been accepted as true.
By this Brueggemann means that the power of hope found Isaiah’s poetry is not likely to be felt without the conflicted prophecies of Jeremiah, who saw the exile as the will of God for a disobedient people (25:8-11), and without the tough declaration of Ezekiel that the God of Israel was indeed a holy God (chs. 1-3; 33-37; 40-48). Thus without accepting the reality of exile in the light of these preceding prophetic messages of God’s judgment and God’s holiness, to speak of the hope of homecoming would be for the Jewish exiles, or for us, an offer of cheap grace.
These words, “the homecoming metaphor makes sense only where the metaphor of exile has been accepted as true,” set us up for the completion of our foray into Ezra 1:1-11. We remember that the substance of our last study was that the exiles in Babylon saw their return from captivity to Jerusalem and Judah as a “Second Exodus”; they saw it as a rebirth of their nation no less wonderful and faith-inspiring than their deliverance from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. In a previous study our look at of the Persian King Cyrus, whose edict allowed the captive Jewish people to return to their native land, indicated a direct link between Isaiah on the one hand, and the exile and the return on the other as seen in one of our texts above: “I have aroused Cyrus in righteousness; . . , he shall . . . set my exiles free” (Isaiah 45:13).
As we have seen, the prophecies contained in Isaiah 40-55 in their original oracle form were primarily addressed to the Hebrew exiles in Babylon, either with long-range prophetic insight by the 8th century Isaiah, or by an unnamed prophet who lived during the sixth century. If the latter, as seems most probable to us, this prophetic-poet directed his prophetic ministry to the captive Jewish people possibly in the years and maybe even months before the collapse of the Babylonian empire in the face of rising Persian power (539 B.C.).
As we noted last lesson, as the prophet speaks to the exiles the motif of a “Second Exodus” permeates the poetry of Isaiah 40-55. Certainly Isaiah’s prophecies were in the mind of the writer of the book of Ezra as he wrote of God stirring up the spirits of “the heads of the families of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites” (1:5). Even more significantly these prophecies had no doubt reached deeply into the hearts of many of the exiles preparing them for their return, indeed, becoming a very part of the divine process of God’s “stirring” of their minds and wills to action.
2.
So we connect the presence of the Exodus motif in Ezra-Nehemiah with a brief exploration of the prophecies of the exilic Isaiah 40-55. Not only are the echoes of the Exodus tradition present throughout the poems of Isaiah 40-55, but they also vividly both open and close this central section of the book of Isaiah. Opening Isaiah 40 are familiar lines we hear every Christmas season. Hear them afresh in the context of the captive Jewish exiles:
A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken” (40:3-5). And then as the section comes to a close with 55:12-13 the prophetic word is For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. But how are we to define or put content into the report that God “stirred” or “aroused” the spirits of some of the exiles? First, the people had been in Babylon for a long time, forty to fifty years. Many had become comfortable and secure in their “home away from home,” some had indeed became rich if we are to judge from the wealth carried back to Jerusalem as indicated by the size of their freewill offerings for the rebuilding of the temple (Ezra 2:68-69). And many of them had assimilated Babylonian culture and views of reality because no available alternatives were on the horizen: it was the ideological intent of the empire to talk Jews out of Jewish perceptions of reality and into Babylonian definitions of reality, to define life in terms of Babylonian values, Babylonian hopes, and Babylonian fears. The Jewish exiles needed to be reminded of who they were, that they were in reality exiles, alienated from their proper homeland! They had suffered the loss of their world of faith. Many of them had forgotten that they were a covenant people! Yet we need to remember that they had seen their city fall and their glorious temple laid waste, that they were a people who had suffered the loss in a some real sense of their entire world of faith. They had endured a long season of exilic discontent, failure and grief, even hopelessness for it seemed that Babylon and its definitions of reality would endure. Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak O Israel, “My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God”? (40:27)
But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me” (49:14).
The exiles needed to know that the Babylonians were not the last word, God was! They needed to hear Isaiah’s word that the Babylonian gods were indeed dethroned, that the empire had failed and no longer to be feared or trusted. It had been indeed humiliated:
Bel bows down, Nebo stoops . . . They stoop, they bow down together, they cannot save the burden, but themselves go into captivity (46:1-2). Come down and sit in the dust, virgin daughter Babylon! Sit on the ground without a throne, daughter Chaldea! (Isa. 47:1)
The exiles needed their confidence reawakened, their hope restored, to know that they will be free to go home, so comes the reply,
Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. . . . but those 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. (40:28-29, 31).
So “everyone whose spirit God had stirred—got ready to go up and rebuild the house of the LORD in Jerusalem.” They heard the word from Isaiah,
Go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea, declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it, send it forth to the end of the earth; say, “The LORD has redeemed his servant Jacob!” (48:29)
Thus many of the exiles were “stirred” by the Lord to return, to really GO HOME! The basis of their inspiration was a “new thing”:
See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them (52:9; cf. 43:18-19).
This prophet of the exile, one who drew deeply upon the wealth of Israel’s traditions, in declaring God’s promises to the people dipped not only into the conditional Mosaic covenant, but blended with the unconditional Davidic covenant. “’In full view of man’s ineradicable tendency to do wrong,’” . . . the prophet announced that God’s “faithfulness to his people, though momentarily eclipsed by the shadow of his judgment, is more secure than the enduring mountains.”
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hands double for all her sins. . . .
When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the LORD will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. . . . Incline your ear, and come to me; Listen, so that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. (40:1-2; 41: 17-18, cf. 19-20: 55:1, 3).
The constancy of God’s faithfulness is a theme that penetrates the poems of the prophet for he began with
The grass withers, the flower fades; But the word of our God will stand forever (40:8; cf. vv 6-8).
And continues to declare,
Israel is saved by the LORD with everlasting salvation; you shall not be put to shame or confounded to all eternity (45:17).
As these verses powerfully suggest we cannot stop with the return of the Babylonian exiles to Jerusalem, for the LORD’s “new thing” reaches even unto us—and beyond!
3. For lack of adequate words of our own we make free use of those of Bernard Anderson as he writes that the rhapsody of the poetry of Isaiah 40-55 is based upon a vision which soars above the mundane plane which is characterized by the transience of all human achievements and the fallibility of human performance and perceives the dimension of divine transcendence. In Isaiah’s portrayal of the new exodus of salvation his hope for the future is not grounded, in the final analysis, upon anything historical. Even Israel’s history is significant only in so far as it points beyond itself and bears witness to the Creator whose faithfulness embraces the whole sweep of history, from creation to consummation. All our previous quotations are caught up in this overwhelming vision, “the vision of Isaiah” (1:1) that sees a future for our world: I am the LORD, your Holy One, . . . Thus says the LORD, who makes a path in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, . . . Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert (43:15-16, 18-19).
For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it a chaos, he formed it to be inhabited!): I am the LORD, and there is no other. . . . There is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is no one besides me. Turn to me and be saved, All the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. . . . “To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear” (45:17-18, 21-23).
Conclusion
Is there a ground for hope for the refugees, for the exiles of the world, in the God of Israel and the nations, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the sovereign Father of us all? Is God at work among the displaced peoples of our world? We trust so--it is our biblical faith that it is so!
Even more than that, are you and I part of a displaced people? Are we in exile? In the midst of the call to return home comes the appeal, the exhortation, indeed the command,
Depart, depart, go out from there! Touch no unclean thing; Go out from the midst of it, purify yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the LORD (52:11; cf. Ezra 1:7-11).
The apostle Paul picked up this command as the heart of his call to holiness, a call to a church in exile in a pagan Corinthian culture:
Do not be mismatched with unbelievers. For what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness? Or what fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Beliar? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore come out from them, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean; then I will welcome you, and I will be your father, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.’ Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and of spirit, making holiness perfect in the fear of God (2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1)
To paraphrase Brueggemann, Is the Church today, in the Western World, in exile in an alien culture? To be in Exile as Christians is to have a sense of not belonging, to live in an awareness of being in an environment hostile to our values and vocation as a Christian community bound in covenant to Jesus Christ. We practice Exile when we refuse to accept and be assimilated to an alien imperial culture, symbolized by Babylon, and resist its domestication, a resistance than can result in oppression. Homecoming is the dramatic decision to break with imperial rationality and to embrace a place called home where covenantal values have currency and credibility. The place of exile, Babylon, and homecoming next to each other in Isaiah 40-55 means that its inspired poetry
is not aimed simply at geographical, spatial possibility but at a relational, covenantal reality. The poetry permits a very different reading of social reality, opening up quite new social possibilities. The poetry evokes the sense that the world can and will be organized differently. Only a poet could make available such a drastically subversive conviction and invitation.
“And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
From North, “The Chronicler,” 385-386. The Second Temple (Ezra 1:1—6:22 A. Cyrus and the Return (1:1-11) Zerubbabel and the List (2:1-70) C. Laying the Cornerstone (3:1-13) Interruption: The Samaritans (4:1-24) Prophetic Nudge to Completion (5:1—6:22) Ezra’s Return and the Torah (Ezra 7:1—10:44) Rearmament of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 1:1--7:72) Ezra’s Torah Promulgated (Nehemiah 7:73—9:38) Nehemiah’s Reform (Nehemiah 10:1—13:30) Timeline for the events in Ezra-Nehemiah Reign of Cyrus II of Persia (550-530) Conquest of Babylon by Cyrus II (539) Edict of Cyrus and Return of the Exiles (538) Reign of Cambyses in Persia (530-522) Reign of Darius I in Persia (522-486) Temple Rebuilt (520-515) The first division was I. “The LORD stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus,” presented January 28, 2007. A lot depends on how and who is counted. And this is not to mention the plight of the “undocumented aliens” among us, and the complexity of the problem of illegal immigration for the United States. Bruggemann, Hopeful Imagination, 94. Ibid., 90. We remember that Isaiah chapters 40-55 are closely connected to chapters 1-39, and 40-55’s “new thing” of God’s deliverance is intended precisely as a countertheme to the themes of God’s judgment emanating from his holiness in 1-39. January 28, 2007, “The Stirrings of God” Part One.” The same Hebrew verb as in Ezra 1:1, 5. Hebrew is simply “him.” NRSV translators, believing the reference is to Cyrus as he is mentioned in verse 1, inserts the name with a marginal note. Biblical scholars are divided on this issue. The more conservative scholars take the first view, but the majority take the second view, including many evangelical scholars, with whom we identify. Cyrus edict is dated at 538 B.C. Part #1 was covered in our last lesson, February 25, 2007, “The Stirrings of God: Part Two.” See also 41:17-20; 42:14-16; 43:1-3; 43:14-21; 48:20-21; 49:8-12; 51:9-10, 52:11-12. See Herb Prince, “Anonymity As Art And As Act: Ezra 2:68-70” (Come and Go, February 18, 2007), 5. Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination, 92.
See 41:17-20; 42:5-9. Bernhard W. Anderson, :”Exodus and Covenant in Second Isaiah and Prophetic Tradition,” in Frank Moore Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, Jr., Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976), 348. Anderson, “Exodus and Covenant in Second Isaiah,” 356. Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination, 107-108. An alternate conclusion is suggested by the article by Robert Corin Morris, “Apocalypse Fever: The Perennial Return of the End Times,” Weavings, Volume xxi, Number 6 (November/December 2006), 37-45. He writes of the prevalent “Apocalypse Fever” characteristic of our age in many quarters around the world, a fever not unique to our age. Morris concludes that “all us” who live in such end times, indeed a kairos moment in world history, “are called to awaken to our secret identity and mission as Christ-bearers in the world. . . . The stakes are higher this time around the apocalyptic bonfire, to be sure. Alarming environmental degradation, anxiety-producing terrorism, mind-boggling social change, and the shaking of the social foundations of religion may make us falter. But we always have a choice. We can be among those who ‘faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the earth’ (Luke 21:26). Or we—like the apocalyptic writers of old—can pray for eyes to see possibility as well as peril in the turmoil of our times. Perhaps the stakes are so high and the human journey so perilous because God’s dream for this earth is more audacious than anything we would dare to dream ourselves. After all, this is the God who, while empires rise and fall, says, ‘See, I am making all things new’ (Rev. 21:5).” (37).
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