The Human Scar of Exile
In the course of getting ourselves kicked out of church we started to see a pattern of behavior. We referenced it briefly in the All the Problems of the World… post, where we said:
We’ve written about, and will write more about, this topic – but the summary is, people think that if someone near them is doing behavior X, it will cause them pain. They think that if someone near them is misbehaving according to God, then they will feel pain from God as a result.
This is an old, old cultural scar. Homophobia, racism, legalism, basically all kinds of hatred are examples of this. It’s a lie that people believe and respond to: “I need to control you, or something bad will happen to me. I need you to be what I think God wants, or we won’t be safe.”
We’ve gone over and over the ground of how people try to keep themselves safe. We even know part of why people do this – because of the one fear, the fear of being alone because of who you truly are. We do crazy, damaging things trying to keep ourselves and our relationships safe – and we do crazy, damaging things trying to make the people around us into our definition of safe as a result.
Old Testament
In the Old Testament, before what Laine very affectionately calls The Jesus Cheat, people seemingly could not live up to God’s expectations. For a while, God tried giving us a list of rules, and he expected that if we truly loved him, if we truly followed him, we would just…do those things. But…he also made us with a whole lot of free will, and curiosity, and passion, and then there was the original sin thing that resulted in all of us being a little bit broken and perhaps more than a little bit inclined to hide from God. Sometimes, as an attempt at corrective measures or maybe just because he was pissed, people who did not follow God’s checkboxes would end up exiled.
Exile is being kept away from:
- the safe place
- our purpose
- God’s protection
- …and God himself
The Jewish people in the OT are examples of some of the most famous of exiles – with the biggest being The Exile, where they were conquered, dragged out of Jerusalem with hooks and chains, and forced to leave their homeland with little hope of ever seeing it again. They lost everything – home, possessions, most of their loved ones, national identity, and worst of all, hope – hope that God would be with them and protect them.
After this trauma, they vowed never to let it happen again. Never again never again! We will control our destiny, we will make sure we are safe!
Enforcing Safety on the Way Home
On the way back from The Exile, Ezra and Jeremiah force marriages and families apart to preserve the cultural and religious purity of the Jewish people (Ezra 9-10). In a rather stunning act of what one could argue was religious racism, they declare that they must send away all wives who were from the surrounding areas, and all children born of those wives.
Never mind that the wives had converted to Judaism.
Never mind that Moses’s wife was not Jewish.
…and never mind that nowhere in there does it say that God told them to send away their wives and children. In fact, it says that God allowed them out of exile – did they think that God wasn’t aware that they’d married outside of their race when he un-exiled them? Ezra was trying to keep the people safe from continued exile, so he interpreted a previously understood checkbox from God in the most extreme way possible. And…in the OT, that was potentially legit, because God did expect us to be able to follow those checkboxes.
The Jesus Cheat, or Enforcing Safety on the Way Home part 2: Exile of the Soul
and I know,
we are not alone,
we feel an unseen love.
We are sons and heirs of grace,
we are children of,
a light that never dims, a love that never dies.
Keep your chin up, child, and wipe the tears, from your eyes.
We feel, an unseen love…we are children of light.
And then…God sent Jesus, and Jesus took on all of our sins. Part of understanding the Jesus Cheat is understanding that checkboxes don’t work when it comes to relationships – and faith is, at its core, about a one on one relationship with God. Only choice matters in relationships, including relationship with God.
He was in the world,
and the world was created through Him,
yet the world did not recognize Him.
He came to His own,
and His own people did not receive Him.
But to all who did receive Him,
He gave them the right to be children of God,
to those who believe in His name,
who were born,
not of blood,
or of the will of the flesh,
or of the will of man,
but of God. (John 1:10-13)
The theory behind the Jesus Cheat is that Jesus was God making a choice to remain in relationship with people, freely given, when…we aren’t perfect. If that’s true, then the Jesus Cheat guaranteed, and continues to guarantee, us a relationship with God if we’re willing to have one. Jesus, as a decision on God’s part, did away with all of the checkboxes. It also did away with the threat of exile – as a decision that God makes.
Jesus showed this, he showed what he was and some of why God sent him, by frequently punching controlled-safety-via-checkboxes in the face.
The descendants of Jeremiah and Ezra (the Pharisees) ended up very fond of checkbox faith, actually – and sometimes in the Bible Jesus pokes fun at their judgement – while he’s just flat-out brutal about it some other times (all from Matthew 23):
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!”
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
“You testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?“
That last one is especially important. Pre-The Exile, the leaders of Israel routinely killed the messengers of God – the Prophets. They killed the Prophets because they thought that if they could ignore the truth hard enough, they could maintain their reality – the one in which they successfully guaranteed their own safety. It was a great big, “nyahhh nyahhh can’t hear you!!! So you don’t exist!!!….So I’ll kill you so that you stop speaking.”
Jesus points this out as his fate as well:
Just at that time some Pharisees approached, saying to Him, “Go away, leave here, for Herod wants to kill You.” And He said to them, “Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I reach My goal.’ Nevertheless I must journey on today and tomorrow and the next day; for it cannot be that a prophet would perish outside of Jerusalem. (Luke 13:33)
And…yeah, that happened. The people killed the man who spoke the truth: the truth that they were wrong about God, and that they were wrong about their fear – but actually worst of all, Jesus told them that they were wrong about being able to ensure their own safety. Jesus’ reality (aka actual reality) was easier, lighter, happier, and came with guaranteed relationship with God – but it was inherently less controlled and less controllable.
They believed that they could force God to keep them safe.
Jesus, on the other hand, knew that God would love them no matter what – but God would love them on God’s terms.
Enforcing Safety Now
People believe they can control others into being safe, which will then guarantee their safety:
“If you’re going to be near me, I will make you behave in a manner that is pleasing to God. This will keep God’s wrath far away from me.”
And people still follow this pattern of “I can definitely prevent my own exile.” We’ve all experienced bad times – big and small sad events that teach us lessons about fear and control. We think we know what will keep “us” safe, whoever is included in “us”. And we believe in the human scar of exile, of being separated from God, so strongly that we fight, manipulate, and resist anyone who tries to do anything outside of what we’ve accepted as safe – and we define “safe” as the checkboxes we think God wants checked.
As a result, any change, especially a radical change, is met with suspicion and fear, opposition, and occasionally some amount of human cruelty.
- If there are gay people in our community, there will be too much gayness!
- You can’t say that God wants you to do a thing that scares us!
- If we release application changes faster, something will break and we’ll all get in trouble!
- If you switch build tools, we’ll lose control, and WHO KNOWS WHAT COULD HAPPEN!
Staying in Exile
The biggest problem with this plan is that God already told us he isn’t going to exile us again, but we don’t believe him. So we throw up a fake cardboard cutout of God in front of the real one, and…we force ourselves into exile by hiding from him.
By being afraid of exile and white knuckling our safety, we remain in exile – and we fight to bring others with us.
…and when we think we have to control other people and our reality to keep from going into exile, we wrestle control from God. We fight so hard to control and to bring other people into exile so we can be “safe” that we manipulate other people (often brutally), we break other people’s relationships, and and we break communities.
Another Pertinent Exile Example from the Bible
“You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You are just like your ancestors: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him— you who have received the law that was given through angels but have not obeyed it.”
When the members of the Sanhedrin heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”
At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him.
Stephen speaks what he believes to be the truth. And they were so afraid that he might be right, that they killed him for it.
This is how you know that people are afraid: they can’t hear that they might be wrong. Instead they tell you, “you aren’t afraid enough to keep us out of exile, we will make you more afraid of the things we fear.”
They scream, they yell, they manipulate, they control – because the reality in which they are in control is more palatable than actual reality: where God is in control, and we can’t make ourselves free from hurt or sadness – but God has got this, and all we have to do is follow him.
Coming Out Of Exile
The clearest and most powerful story of coming out of The Exile is in Acts 10, when Peter is told to eat the unclean food and mingle with unclean cultures:
Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”
“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”
The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
This happened three times…
GPT (God Pro Tip): If you ever want to know for sure that God means what he says, pay attention when he says it multiple times. In this case, Peter gets this message three times, and then the whole story is repeated again in Acts chapter 11.
God is telling Peter: “All the rules (checkboxes) about food and culture (the foundations of Jewish safety and not-exile – remember Ezra?) – those rules are out the window now. I keep you safe. It is me that you serve.” And, it’s a little funny as an observer, but Peter argues with him: “No God! I would never do the thing you are telling me to do! I check the boxes so good!”
Ironically, Peter forgets this whole thing – because he gets scared – and the apostle Paul has to forcefully remind him of what he was originally taught by God. TL;DR: changing yourself to be free of fear and living lives serving God in freedom is hard. Relying on checkboxes to keep you safe seems comparatively easier.
Staying out of Exile – or Finding the Way Home
Making change is hard. Changing culture is hard, explaining new ways of seeing the world is hard. Explaining new ways of seeing God is especially hard. If you are meant to be one of these change-makers, or new-seers (or sometimes, “catalysts”), there is damage associated. Damage, and learned fear, and self-reinforcing pain. But…you don’t have to change…anything, actually. All you have to do is live aligned to God’s purpose for you – to live in peace yourself. And not take on other people’s fear.
Dealing with change is hard. If you are a person who loves consistency and sameness, and you think “lack of change” is equivalent to safety, or even “lack of change on the important things” is equivalent to safety, this is also for you. God has periodically changed the rules on the most important things. He has taken those who thought they knew every rule that kept them safe and brutally upended their worldview. We have to love God (and his unpredictable nature) more than we love the “rules”. We know this is hard. God will use people to push on you. Keep in mind that you don’t know everything about God when they do.
Ideally, we would think about if a catalyst is saying a true thing or not. If not, we would respond by saying, “welp. I’m pretty sure God does not want you to do that, and here are my reasons why I think that. But if you choose to do it anyway, I will love you just as much, and if you’re wrong, God will handle that.” We wouldn’t try to force the catalyst to be…anything other than what they are, because we know that God will love both the catalyst and us, no matter what.
This is what God said was most important, and this is all that we have to do:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31)
Right before Jesus died, God bailed on him. Jesus lived through the very worst kind of alone, the most painful kind of alone, after a lifetime of extremely close relationship with God. And he was this most painful kind of alone through the absolute worst in his life – and it was the absolute worst time in everyone’s lives, because he died carrying the weight of everyone’s sin.
Alone, separate from God, abandoned by God – that’s the exile that we’re all so afraid of.
But Jesus took on that exile so that our sins – which are what exiled people from God, and also how we exile ourselves from God now – were forgiven. True forgiveness. And this forgiveness means that Jesus carried both our sins and our potential exile so that no one would ever have to again. God doesn’t abandon anyone. Exile is a lie.
The way out of exile is…to believe God. To trust that all we have to do is agree to a relationship with him, and then there is no more exile.