By the Rivers of Babylon

There is a song that begins by a river, a long way from home. Zion, in it, is another name for Jerusalem. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. We hung up our harps on the willow trees. For the people who had carried us off there asked us for a song, and the ones who had marched us all that way wanted a tune — “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” “— and how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign country? If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget how to do anything at all.” That is what the exile was: people sitting by somebody else’s river with their instruments in a tree, being asked to be entertaining.

And behind them, hundreds of miles away, was the city they were remembering, and it was not there any more. Jeremiah sat down in the ruins of it and wrote the whole thing out in a poem. He made the poem go all the way through the alphabet, from the first letter to the last, one line at a time, as though he meant to leave nothing out. It is called Lamentations, which means crying out loud, and it is a short book, and every word of it hurts. “How the city sits by herself, the one that used to be so full of people. She has turned into a widow. She cries in the night, and the tears run down her face, and out of all her friends there is not one to comfort her.” “The roads up to Zion are in mourning, because nobody comes to the feast any more. Her gates are broken. Her priests groan. Her young women are led away.” “The old men of the city sit on the ground and say nothing, with dust on their heads. Little children ask their mothers, ‘Where is the bread? Where is the wine?’ — and there is none, in all the streets.” “The gold has gone dull. The holy stones are lying about at the top of every street. Foxes walk over the hill of Zion, because there is nobody left on it.” Nobody in that poem pretends it was an accident, either. Right in the middle of the crying, the poem says: the Lord is in the right; it was I who would not listen.

And then, right in the middle, the poem turns round. It does not stop hurting. It turns round while it is still hurting, and this is what it says. “I said: it is finished. My hope from the Lord has gone.” “And then I put this in my heart, and because of it I shall hold on: the Lord is good to the ones who wait for him — good to the soul that goes looking for him. It is a good thing to wait quietly for the Lord to come and get you.” “Because the Lord does not throw people away for ever. He makes them sorry, and then he is sorry for them, because he has so much mercy in him.” “I called on your name, Lord, out of the bottom of the pit — and you heard my voice. You came near me on the day I called you. And you said to me: do not be afraid.” And it stops without an ending. The last words are a question and a plea: you, Lord, go on for ever, and your throne goes on from one lifetime to the next — so why would you forget us this long? Turn us back to you, and we will come back. Make our days new again, the way they used to be. And then it simply stops. Nobody answers. They had to wait.

They waited seventy years, and while they waited they had the prophets, and the prophets all said the same thing: you are going home. Jeremiah had put a number on it before it even started — seventy years, and then I will come for you. Isaiah had a voice shouting in the desert to get the road ready. Comfort my people, said God; comfort them; speak to the heart of Jerusalem. And that is how it happened.

Babylon did not last. A king of Persia named Cyrus took it, and in the first year that he was king the Lord stirred up his heart, and he had a notice written out and read aloud in every corner of his empire: “This is what Cyrus king of the Persians says: the Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he himself has told me to build him a house in Jerusalem, in Judah. Is there anyone here who belongs to his people? Then may his God be with him — and let him go up.” And Cyrus went to his treasure house and brought out the gold and silver dishes that Nebuchadnezzar had carried off out of the house of the Lord, and had them counted, one by one, and handed over to be carried home. So the people who had sat down and cried by the rivers of Babylon got up, and took their harps down out of the willow trees, and went home.