“In my Babylonian moods keep the vision of Jerusalem alive in my heart…” -Eugene Peterson, _Praying With The Psalms_
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No one knows the fate of the Ark of the Covenant. Some speculate that it was hidden away by faithful priests, or stolen and subsequently lost, waiting to this day to be discovered. Others believe that the Ark met an inglorious and permanent end when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. I’m no scholar on this matter, just one more rube with an opinion; but my opinion, for what it’s worth, hopes the former but suspects the latter. I’d like to believe the Ark is safe and sound, somewhere. But I fear that it did, in fact, meet with destruction some 2600 years ago…and the Biblical silence about it could be due to the simple human fact that some things are just too terrible for words.
Call me a pessimist, but I’ve lived long enough to have lost a younger person’s unequivocal belief in happy endings. In this world, the great do devour the small, and get away with it. Evil does, indeed, prosper…and prosper, and prosper, while the righteous “beg bread” in stark contrast to Psalm 37’s optimistic assurances. The “justice system” often churns out anything but. And daily, in myriad ways, and for no apparent reason, people are thrown into their own Good Fridays, and no Easter Sunday follows.
What befell the Ark? I may never know. But I do know that this world is quite capable of devouring a footlocker-sized object made of wood and gold. Why not? -it devoured the people who made the Ark. Well, almost devoured them, and that many times over.
One of the most “almost” of those times came about 2600 years ago, when the aforementioned Babylonians surrounded, besieged, and eventually captured Jerusalem, killing most and enslaving the rest in an alien land. Scripture tells the story in bits and pieces, weaving a heartrending picture of a people who, when they sat down “by the waters of Babylon…and wept”, had much to weep about. All of the Hebrew exiles would have known hunger, deprivation, and the loss of loved ones – including little children. They would have heard about – perhaps seen – the destruction of their Temple; they would have known that the Ark, “God on earth” for them, was lost. And they would have been slaves in a strange land, with all the hardships and injustices that go with that fact.
Many of the exiles would have died early on, of grief or hardship or both. Those who did survive, adapted – making the best of things, as people will do; and of those survivors, some “went native” to their new land, but some few others – stubborn, faithful – clung to their memories of the Old Country like weeds cling to a cliff face. We should be glad that these few faithful souls did that, for these were the few who gave us much of Scripture as we currently have it.
See, cool as the scene is in The Ten Commandments where God carves the stone tablets on mountain rock with divine lightning and a big, booming, English-speaking voice, it didn’t go down quite like that. Best scholarship says that the Hebrew scriptures were compiled over time – revealed, passed down orally, then written down, then put together in something like the order we read them in today.
And a lot – not all, but a lot – of that writing-down-and-compiling happened…guess when, guess where? During the Exile.
With their city in ruins, their Temple burnt down, their relics confiscated by a foreign king, their people scattered and enslaved, and their Ark lost, the handful of surviving priests had a crisis on their hands – that’s “crisis” as in “danger and opportunity, both together”. They ended up using their time and experience of exile as a crucible – reexamining and codifying their faith and their history, renewing and in some ways reinterpreting their people’s identity, asking and answering some big questions about themselves, their world, and their God, and the relationship between all three.
Whether we would like, or agree with, all the conclusions they reached and all the answers they found (and they don’t even agree with one another on all points), is immaterial. The point is, they went into exile as a people who’d lost their Ark, and some of them…enough of them…came out of exile as a people who’d become the Ark. By necessity, they had learned to internalize their faith – in those days, that was a new thing whose truth and wonder would take time to appreciate.
Great devour small, evil prospers, injustice is, and bad things certainly do happen to good people. Faced with this, sometimes more closely than we would care to be, we have two choices: we can let bitterness consume us, or we can let bitterness transform us, even as it transformed the Israelite remnant 2600 years ago. When the various icons and idols and externals by which we define ourselves are systematically smashed, we will be left with either no faith, or else a tougher, scrappier, internalized faith.
By the waters of Babylon, a broken people sat down and wept, remembering what they’d lost and raging against those who’d taken it from them. Some of those broken people never got up. But some of them – enough of them – did. Enough that their faith and their history and their identity as a people went from residing in a wooden box, to living in countless human hearts. Enough that their Temple could grow feet and spread itself throughout the nations.
The people could certainly have done without Babylon and the exile. But…could we? How would history have been different, if that faithful and hard-pressed remnant had never been forced to take their faith out of the Ark and beyond the Temple Mount?
And how might our own little exiles, our own little falls of Jerusalem, be shaping histories yet to be written?
Tags: Ark of the Covenant, faith, grief, post-Exile, scripture, transformation
