The inhumanity of one human to another does not begin with Jesus’ crucifixion. Sunday’s first reading records an ancient example of God’s people losing faith and falling away into injustice and irreverence, “into all the abominations of the nations.”
Israel’s compassionate God warns them and seeks to spare them from the consequences of their wickedness. But eventually, like their ancestors in the desert whom the fiery serpents bit, the Israelites suffer their own near destruction. In 587 B.C., the Chaldeans (Babylonians) loot Jerusalem, destroy the temple, and kill or carry into captivity most of the people.
After the 70 years Jeremiah prophesied, Israel’s faithful and merciful God sends a savior. He is Cyrus the Persian, a Gentile king, who promises to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and invites the exiles to go home.
Cyrus makes a decree.
All the leading priests and the people were exceedingly unfaithful, following all the abominations of the nations and polluting God’s temple, which the Holy One had consecrated in Jerusalem.
The Holy One, the God of their ancestors, sent messengers to them, for God had compassion on the people and the dwelling place. But they mocked the messengers of God, despised God’s warnings, and scoffed at God’s prophets, until the anger of the Holy One against the people was so inflamed that there was no remedy. Their enemies burnt the house of God, tore down the walls of Jerusalem, burned all its palaces with fire, and destroyed all its precious vessels. Those who escaped the sword were carried captives to Babylon, where they became servants of the king of the Chaldeans and his sons until the kingdom of the Persians came to power. All this was to fulfill the word of the Holy One spoken by Jeremiah, until the land has made up for its sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept sabbath to fulfill seventy years.
In the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in fulfillment of the word of the Holy One spoken by Jeremiah, God stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus so that he sent a herald throughout all his kingdom and also declared in a written decree:
“Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia: ‘The Holy One, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and charged me to build a temple in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever among you belongs to any part of God’s people, let them go up, and may their God be with them.’”
2 Chronicles 36.14-16,19-23
Exiles and refugees fill our world: children, men and women, the aged and decrepit, fleeing their homes and ruthless slaughter. Who is coming to their rescue? Must people wait 70 years? These questions test our faith and hope as they sorely try our sisters and brothers who suffer oppression and horror.
What kind of savior do we look for? A military conqueror like Cyrus? A bronze serpent like the one Moses lifted up in the desert? Or one like us, the Son of Man, himself a sufferer, who was lifted up that we might believe in his way?
The loving, merciful God of Israel and of Jesus is no deus ex machina. God works in human history through human agents such as Moses, Cyrus, Nicodemus, God’s own Son, Jesus — and us. If this Jesus is the savior for whom we hope, then we ourselves are necessarily part of the salvation we want him to bring.
- Who suffers exile that you can help return home?