Jeremiah writes a letter to the exile community in Babylon
to comfort and encourage them in their suffering. His word is to settle in for the long haul,
build houses, let your kids get married, do life, seek the prosperity of the
city, don’t huddle among yourselves and create a little Jewish ghetto. The
promise is that they will be there for seventy years, longer than nearly any of
them are likely to live. They won’t be
coming back but, like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob before them, they will live in
faith that their ancestors will be in the land.
Their exile is nearly twice the amount of time their fathers spent in
the wilderness. We live in exile from
our true home and this same advice should be heard by us, not just the promise
to bless and prosper. We are to be good
citizens, taking an active part in blessing the places where we’re exiled. The Jewish people have done this now for a
couple thousand years in all the places they have been exiled and frequently,
their prosperity has been great enough to arouse persecution against them. In some ways we learn to be exiles by
observing their ways.
Jesus seems not to care very much about the problems of his
friends in Bethany, doing nothing when they send news of Lazarus’ sickness for
the first two days. This reaction is
very much like what we see in John 2 at Cana when Mary puts her problem to
Jesus at the wedding and also John 7 when his brothers suggest He go up to the
Feast of Booths and initially Jesus demurs but then goes. He moves at the impulse of the Spirit and
this time is no different. The miracle
is enhanced by the delay. The disciples
don’t understand why He wants to go since the last time they were there the
people were prepared to stone Jesus and they are aware that as His disciples
they will come in for similar scrutiny. Ultimately,
Thomas says, “Let’s go and die with Him.”
Martha’s greeting is accusatory, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t
have died but Jesus calls her to a higher faith even than that. She makes her confession that He is “the
Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.” That He is resurrection and life are included
in that idea but not until the last day.
Certainly we are to have an attitude towards the Jews that
respects the reality that we are grafted into the covenant by faith but it is
they into which we have been grafted. As
with Hosea’s child, we were once not a people and not loved and now we are
because of the rejection of the Jews for their rejection of Jesus. Our prayer should be for them to believe as
we stand in faith. Paul says that we are
nourished by the root which is Judaism and it is important for us to know those
roots and appreciate them while simultaneously realizing that the knowledge
they possessed and possess does not lead them to Jesus, it is the Spirit which
makes that possible. The faith that led
them to expect to return after seventy years in Babylon and rebuild the city
and the temple is the faith that we have in the resurrection from the dead, we
have been there and seen that in Jesus. We
remember what He has done in the past to give us hope for the future.
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