Return from Exile

In this homily, Fr Richard Healey shares the concept of exile, drawing parallels to personal hardships and natural disasters. He recounts the historical exile of Jerusalem’s people during the Babylonian invasion, and their eventual return and rebuilding of the city. He emphasises the importance of repentance and returning to peace and unity with God, encouraging listeners to reflect on their own ‘exiles’ and seek spiritual restoration.

(00:00:00) – To get a sense of our readings today. I think it’s important to remember something in our lives, like if you were on holidays and there was bad weather, and so maybe the highway got closed by by flooding, maybe there were delays with the the airport, the flights weren’t going to be taking off, or it was a strike or something like that, or perhaps the period when you were sick, when you weren’t able to do the things that you once were able to do and you had to be stuck in bed or something happened, you broke a leg or something that prevented you from doing the normal things that you were used to doing. And that experience of just being disconnected, not being able to be with your friends, to do the things that you like to do. That sense of being in the in between, that experience of being in exile. Well, imagine if that was the case, but it wasn’t a natural disaster or something that you couldn’t really blame someone for, but an evil empire that swept in and conquered your land.

(00:01:17) – That was the situation that the people of Jerusalem faced in the early seventh century BC, when the Babylonians came and utterly destroyed both the city of Jerusalem and all the lands surrounding it. And the King at that time was forced to watch while he was bound in chains. And one by one they killed all the members of his family before his eyes, and then they gouged out his eyes so that the last thing that he would remember to see was the death of his own family. And then, bound in chains, he was forced to walk with all of the other exiles, all the other people of Israel, for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres across the desert to the city of Babylon. And there they’re not just there for a few days, a few weeks, a few months, but for year after year, trying to make sense of what had gone wrong, what had happened, how they were going to survive and live and and build a new identity, how they were going to be faithful to the Torah when the temple and everything that it meant was, was now gone.

(00:02:41) – And they were there, stuck in this utterly foreign experience. And then, you know, after a whole generation, so, so many of those first people that were taken in exile would have died there in the foreign land, and the weeping and the whole sense of desolation and loss and trauma that they experienced. But some, some who are young, some who would just hear it and some who were teenagers at that time would have survived and been able to experience the utter joy when the Babylonians were conquered, first by the Medes and then by the Persians and King Cyrus, and then given them this freedom, you were able to go back. And not only that, he was going to give them the money that they needed to be able to rebuild both the walls of the city and then also the temple itself. And we read about that in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. And so imagine the wonder when the people made their way back and they got down into the Jordan Valley and they were there.

(00:03:49) – They pass through the region of Edom and Moab, and they were now about to cross the river. They’re about to go back into the Promised Land. And they see in the distance the hills where Jerusalem is nestled there on the mountaintop, over on the other side of the valley. Imagine the joy and the wonder, you know. No wonder they wanted to let every valley be filled in, let every mountain be levelled because they wanted to get back to the Holy Land. They wanted to get back to that place as quickly as they possibly could, in order to return to the place that they received the inheritance from. You know, in the back in the days of Abraham and the times when Moses had brought them out of the slavery of Egypt, and he’d died there in the wilderness. But Joshua Joshua had been able to take them through the waters of the Jordan and to conquer the land, and to be able to settle then into that place. And so now, as they return, they want to to rebuild, they want to reestablish things.

(00:04:51) – But in the days of Solomon, the son of King David, back in the 10th century BC, when they first built the. Temple. There’s this beautiful description of the Lord coming with all of his power down upon the temple and the very Shekinah, the very presence, the glory of the Lord rested in the temple, and that is overwhelmed by the awesome nature of the very presence of God dwelling in their midst. But when you read the accounts of the building of the Second Temple after they returned from exile, there’s no description about that glory returning. There’s no sense of God now coming to dwell in the land. So even though physically they’d returned to the land spiritually, they hadn’t yet really made amends with all that had happened. And so, John, when he’s wanting to start this new movement, when he’s preparing the way for Jesus, he knows that there’s only one place that they can go, not in the temple, because it’s lost all of its lustre. It’s lost all of its significance for the people.

(00:06:08) – He takes them down into the Jordan, takes them down into the valley so that they can remember what it was like when Joshua first led the people, when they returned from exile, when they were able to go back into that place of being on the outside, but then being invited to come on home to come and return to Shu. There is the Hebrew word that sense of just returning, coming back, finding our place, finding our experience. And it’s what the Greek word metanoia, or we often just translated as repentance is about. But it’s this beautiful sense that sometimes we’ve had all these thoughts, we’ve had all these experiences that have kind of knocked us out of whack, that have taken us out of that original alignment. And there are times when we need to long for the straight highway of the Lord to be made, so that we can return, so that we can come back to that place where we can experience the very wonder and the presence of God again to find that peace. You know, the second reading today from Saint Peter reminds us of that, that power, you know, that opportunity to experience right now the gift of the new heavens and the new earth, that ultimate destiny that we will find ourselves in.

(00:07:27) – Because in Jesus, all of this has been realised. All of this has been fulfilled. Our experience of being not in the place we want to be because of sin, because of dysfunction, because of addiction, because of whatever has happened in our past, all those experiences that have knocked us off from our equilibrium. But the Lord is inviting us to find again our peace in his righteousness, to find that life and peace is not just something that’s, you know, there’s the absence of conflict, not just the absence of things going wrong in our lives. The Hebrew shalom has this beautiful sense of being whole, of being complete. Like if, you know, one of your walls has been damaged in an accident or something has hit the wall and it’s crumbled a bit and you’re starting to rebuild that wall. And when the final brick is being placed back into the wall, you can say, well, now it is shalom. Now it is whole, now it is complete. And that’s what the Lord is inviting us into.

(00:08:31) – This experience of utter peace, of being in a place of shalom. And shalom is about remembering that we’re so often in exile, we’re so often away from the Lord, and he’s inviting us along the straight highway to come on home to find our experience of being at one with God again. So over these days of advent, that’s what it’s really about getting rid of those things that distract us. Setting aside those experience, things that don’t serve us well anymore, and allowing God to invite us from exile back into the Promised Land, back into life with God, back into that place of shalom, of peace, of unity with the Lord. So let’s spend some time this week really allowing God to invite us again into his peace, into his presence, into his life as we return from exile and find our way through the waters of repentance back into the life of God.