II
Kings 17:5-8, 18-20
The
writer of II Kings was very matter-of-fact when he reported the destruction of
the kingdom of Israel.
“Then the king of Assyria invaded all the
land and came to Samaria; for three years he besieged it. In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of
Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria. He placed them in Halah, on the Habor, the river
of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.”
[II Kings 17:5-6]
He also gives a very simplistic explanation for how
Israel had gone from one great kingdom under David and Solomon, breaking apart
into two kingdoms after Solomon’s death in 922 B.C., and then being swallowed
up by the Assyrian Empire two centuries later.
“This occurred because the people of
Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of
the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshiped other gods and walked in
the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel,
and the customs that the kings of Israel had introduced.” [II Kings 17:7-8]
That left, he said, only the kingdom of Judah, the
land around Jerusalem. That southern
kingdom, however, was on the same track and would fall in 150 years to the
Babylonians who had taken over the Assyrian Empire by then.
The
people who lived through all of this were not as calm about it nor did they see
the reasons as being so cut-and-dry. We
don’t know that directly from the people who were enslaved when Samaria fell,
because they were intentionally scattered around the lands to the east. They disappeared into time. We refer to them, if at all, as the Lost
Tribes of Israel. Their homeland was
resettled by strangers who knew nothing of them nor of the God they worshiped.
From
the people of the southern kingdom, though, we know a great deal. Some of the northerners had fled south, and
had taken with them the record of warnings that had been given to them by
prophets like Hosea and Amos, warnings that had been mostly ignored. To these the southerners had added the words
of their own prophets, especially a man named Jeremiah, who was there at the
end, when Jerusalem fell the way that Samaria had done. He had survived because he was carried away
by a group of refugees who ran from Jerusalem at the last possible moment, like
the von Trappes escaped Austria or Einstein was rescued from Switzerland.
Jeremiah
survived to write a book we now call Lamentations. It is a brutal description of what happened
to Jerusalem and its people, and it puts into words the thoughts and emotions
of anyone who has struggled with the disappointment that comes from suffering
and who is angry with God. Hear what he
had to say (and this is only part of it):
“We have transgressed and rebelled,
and you have not forgiven.
You have wrapped yourself with anger and pursued us,
killing without pity;
you have wrapped yourself with a cloud
so that no prayer can pass through.
You have made us filth and rubbish
among the peoples.
All our enemies
have opened their mouths against us;
panic and pitfall have come upon us,
devastation and destruction.
My eyes flow with rivers of tears
because of the destruction of my people.
My eyes will flow without ceasing,
without respite,
until the Lord from
heaven
looks down and sees.
My eyes cause me grief
at the fate of all the young women in my
city.
Those who were my enemies without cause
have hunted me like a bird;
they flung me alive into a pit
and hurled stones on me;
water closed over my head;
I said, ‘I am lost.’” [Lamentations 3:42-54]
Bitter? You bet, and with good reason.
So why keep his words?
Why preserve the thoughts of someone who one minute pays lip-service to
the standard explanation for disaster – that somehow the people deserved it –
but who really doesn’t accept that and the next moment is accusing God himself
of betrayal? I’ll suggest two reasons.
First: because it’s honest. People really feel this way. If you have never been there, you are truly
blessed or truly oblivious. We all start
out with the notion that good actions lead to good results. Virtue is rewarded and vice is punished. (With the accompanying belief that says if
you are rewarded, you must be on God’s side and if you are not, then you must
have done something wrong.) As you mature,
though, you should begin to question that.
Guilty people go free and innocent people do jail time. There are fights between thugs and bystanders
get killed. Bombs drop on
civilians. People get sick for no
reason. On and on.
The second reason is more important. If you are screaming at God about the
unfairness of life and the injustice of the world and the pain people go
through, then you are still in relationship with God. You may be raging, but deep down you have not
given up on God and deep down you believe that God has not given up on
you. You believe that there has got to
be a reason or an explanation why a God you know is merciful and kind either
causes or allows any of this. It’s in
that struggle that the strongest faith is born, because it is the opposite of
indifference. I’m not saying that God
intentionally does this to teach us painful lessons – don’t get me wrong. I’m saying that God can and does bring good
things out of the worst, and that he does that just because, when all is said
and done, he is God and we are not.
The one thing I am not saying is that there is one,
simple, clear answer. God is complicated
and the world is complicated and we are complicated. If I cannot understand myself, how can I
understand God? This is not a
cop-out. This is a recognition of reality,
which includes human limitation and helplessness. When tragedy strikes, personal or national or
worldwide, that limitation not only becomes obvious, it becomes painful.
Healing comes with holding on. The northern kingdom gave up, and was no more. The southern kingdom held on, and lamented
and cried and questioned, and was restored.
It took a generation or more, and the restoration brought a changed and
chastened people with lasting scars on their souls, yet they eventually rebuilt
their city and their land and found a richer relationship to the God whom they
came to know as a Suffering Servant and a Savior as well as a mighty warrior
king.
It works that way across human experience. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., for many years a
chaplain at Yale and later the senior pastor of Riverside Church in New York,
had a son named Alex who got drunk one night and ended up driving his car off
the road into Boston Harbor, where he drowned.
Coffin was desolate. He wrote,
“The reality of grief
is the solitude of pain, the feeling that your heart’s in pieces, your mind’s a
blank…”[1]
He writes, though, of
another reality that stands next to that one.
“‘My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?’ Yes, but at least, ‘My God, my God”; and the psalm
doesn’t end that way. As the grief that
once seemed unbearable begins to turn now to bearable sorrow, the truths in the
‘right’ [and he puts that in quotation marks] biblical passages are beginning
to take hold: ‘Cast thy burden upon the Lord and he shall strengthen thee’; ‘Weeping
may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning’; ‘Lord, by thy favor
thou hast made my mountain to stand strong’; for thou hast delivered my soul
from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling’; ‘In this world ye
shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world’; ‘The
light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’”[2]
[1]
William Sloane Coffin, “Epilogue: Alex’s Death” in The Courage to Love (New
York: Harper & Row, 1984), 95.
[2] Ibid.,
97-98.
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