This is a time of year when people think about going home. “Home for the holidays” is a catchphrase that speaks of the universal human longing to return to the place we came from, to go back to the people and places that color our earliest memories, to connect us with the innocence of childhood, when the world was full of wonder and we did not know what we know now. This longing is the stuff of the nostalgic images that make up the secular myth of Christmas, those Norman Rockwell, Currier & Ives images of the ancestral home, the extended family, the pastoral landscape, the old ways of work and pastime, the traditional foods and crafts and songs, the sights, sounds and smells of a simpler time.
But of course, for many of us, there is no home to go back to—parents have died, property has been sold, the family is scattered to the four directions. Maybe there never was a home like that to begin with. When I was twelve or thirteen I left my family in Vermont and went back to visit a friend in my old town in Indiana. While I was there I walked a mile or so over to my old house, just to look at it. I remember standing behind one of the trees that lined the driveway, looking up at the place where I had lived with my brothers and parents for five years. It didn’t look much different, but I was struck by the fact that I could not go in, that it was now occupied by people I didn’t know, people to whom I was a stranger. I thought of the times that we had in that house, some of them happy, many of them painful, but all of them gone beyond recapture, and I burst into tears...
“You Can’t Go Home Again” is the title of a 20th Century novel that is also a catchphrase of our culture. I read these words as a child in a classic Peanuts comic strip, and they came to me as I stood grieving that day by the driveway. But as much as “you can’t go home again” is a motto for our times it is not a new idea. It was central to the experience of the people who wrote what we now call the Old Testament. Modern critical scholars believe that the Hebrew Scriptures began to be compiled and edited in the form we have them now by Jews who could not go home, who were in exile in Babylon.
This exile was exactly what the prophets of Israel had been warning might happen. For close to 200 years prophets like Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah had been calling on the Israelites to come home. But the returning they spoke about was not a physical homecoming. The prophets called the people back to their covenant with God. They called them to leave off idol-worship, to put an end to unjust dealings with their neighbors, to return to the way of holiness laid out for them in their law.
The prophets pleaded and cajoled, but they also threatened. They threatened the people that if they did not return to God and his covenant they would be torn apart by internal divisions and swallowed up by the more powerful nations around them. And these warnings came true—first the Assyrian army came and took the northern kingdom of Israel; later the Babylonian empire broke down the walls of Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, and carried the king of Judah and all the leading people of the nation away to Babylon. For prophets like Jeremiah there was no consolation in being right, for they went with the rest into exile.
But in that foreign land, many years later, came a new prophet and a new word from God:
“Comfort, O comfort my people,
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid…”
The time of exile is coming to an end. It is time to come home.
But it will not be a nostalgic return to an idealized past. The prophet does not skip over the bitter lessons of loss, of human frailty, of the inevitability of change—“the people are grass,” he says, “The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand forever.”
And that itself is the great sign of hope, that in the land of exile, amid strange people, without a temple or the material means to carry on their traditions, the God of Israel still speaks. His word to the ruins of Jerusalem is that it is God who is coming home on that highway through the desert. God will re-tell the story of a chosen people’s return to the land, God who will send Jerusalem up a high mountain as a herald of good news to shout in a loud voice “Here is your God!”
The Gospel according to Mark begins with an echo of this cry. We get a picture of John the Baptist that sums up the prophets and their message. His characteristics of clothing and diet are those of Elijah, the prophet who did not die but ascended into heaven, and was expected to return again at the right time. John’s symbolic actions re-enact the Exodus and the Exile, leading the people of Jerusalem out into the wilderness, to pass through the waters of the river Jordan into the promised land. And his word is a word of repentance, of turning back to God.
John’s baptism purifies the people so they can go back home and make a new start, but his message is also about preparing a way for the Lord, a path straight and level. As the last prophet of Israel, John is not satisfied to send the people home renewed; his whole object is to get them ready for the coming of God. God’s word of consolation in exile, the word of God that endures forever, is coming to make his home with them.
There are some who want to make Christianity a religion of nostalgia, a way to go back to a time of innocence, to a Norman Rockwell America, but I think that is a misplaced hope, and a misreading of the gospel. There is no going back. The grass withers, the flower fades, only the word of our God will stand forever. As Christians we have no sacred homeland to go back to, no temple in Jerusalem to rebuild. But because we believe that the word became flesh and dwelt among us, the story of that event, the good news about that person, gives us a way to go, a straight and level road through the desert to a destination deeply familiar and yet at the same time unimagined and unknown.
So every year we go back to the beginning and start over, telling again the story of Jesus. In it we hear the echoes of the prophets of Israel, who pointed the way to his coming, and gave him a path to follow when he came. Every year we learn that it’s a story that was not finished at his death, but is always relearned and retold in the light of his resurrection. And through the spirit that came through him to the church, the spirit in which we were baptized, it is now our story, continually remembered and remade as it is retold in our lives. For Jesus cannot be our way to God, unless he is first God’s way to us, God’s word coming and abiding among us, and in us, and through us taking the whole creation home.
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