By the Rivers of Babylon

The rivers of Babylon were famous long before the late ‘70’s disco group Boney M sang about them.


The Euphrates River  - Photo by Jayel Aheram

The Tigris River and the Euphrates define Mesopotamia – a huge fertile plain ‘between the rivers’, the cradle of civilization. But Israel experienced Babylon as a wasteland, a spiritual desert, despite its rivers of affluence and so-called civilization.

Babylon’s armies had sacked Jerusalem mercilessly, captured her leading populace as trophies-of-war, and marched them to Babylon. No place could have felt more alien to the exiles than the banks of the Euphrates.

Jerusalem - Wailing Wall

The memory of Zion, the city of spiritual shalom, brings them tears of homesickness and longing – and then of anger and revenge. The song, Psalm 137, conveniently forgets Israel’s own greed and injustice that sold Israel down the river, so to speak, the moral decadence and rampant injustice that led to the nation’s collapse and exile. Nostalgia will do that, blurring the memory, but so does the ridicule of the arrogant and powerful.

Their Babylonian captors mock the exiles, calling them to sing and dance the hora, but jubilant songs are impossible when the spirit is crushed. So the poet weeps and asks God to do the remembering, to remember the ferocious violence of the oppressors and to avenge the indignities of the prisoners.

These ancient words have continued to serve Jews of the diaspora down through time camped beside other rivers and hearing the same taunts – along the Volga during the Czar’s pogroms of the nineteenth century, in the ghettos of Warsaw and Budapest in the mid-twentieth century.

Christians in the West today might well use this lament to express their bewilderment and sense of loss as they live as exiles in a post-Christian world. How, we wonder, can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?  Psalm 137 stands as part of the unfinished story of the Older Testament, awaiting the great denoument revealed in the life of Jesus, the Ultimate Exile.

There flows through our broken hurting world a wide river of tears – tears of regret, loss, loneliness, rejection, inequity, shame, homesickness, helplessness, confusion, injustice and despair. One reason psalms like this have endured is that they give voice to the tears, shed and unshed, in every generation. Both Israel and the Church have learned that before we can forgive, we have to name evil for what it is.

Prayer:
Oh God of exiles, remember those who weep and comfort all who mourn. And through the presence of the exiled Christ bring freedom to all kinds of prisoners today.  Amen

Photo Credits:
Euphrates ... Jerusalem ... Warsaw