By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. – Psalm 137:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (April 23, 2014): Psalm 137

We can pretend about a lot of things, but the real condition of our hearts are often revealed by how we mourn – and what drives us into mourning. On March 18, 2012, George Tupou V, the King of Tonga, died. His reign had actually been fairly short – only six years – and yet the news of his death sent the Island nation of Tonga into mourning. In the days following the king’s death, trees and buildings were draped with the colors of mourning – black and purple. The king was treated to a state funeral which featured a procession of 1,000 pall bearers. And the inhabitants of Tonga lined the streets just to have one final chance to say good-bye to their king.

For Tonga, the reality was that while Tupou V’s reign was short, it was extremely effective. In a short six year span the culture of a nation had been changed. Tupou V had started the process of limiting the powers of the monarchy and driving Tonga toward a constitutional democracy. The king had been a forward thinker who had wanted nothing more than to transfer power from the hands of the monarch into the hands of the people. The national identity of the nation was changing with an increase in power being given to those people outside of the Royal Family. For this reason, when the king died, the people responded by an outpouring of mourning and brief that gave honor to their dead king.

As the exiles settle in Babylon, they too are experiencing a change in their national identity, but it was in the reverse direction. Once they had been an independent nation that had been proud of their position in the world, but now they were defeated, their nation had been destroyed – and the people had been carried into exile. Now, it was a foreign king that ruled over the people of Judea – and the result was that the people were in a deep time of mourning.

And the mourning was not something that the people could hide. The psalmist says that they sat on the banks of a river that they did not know and wept over what it was that had been lost – and there was absolutely nothing that could bring back the comfort the people need to soothe their souls.

But the mystery that the psalmist did not understand was that even then, as the exiles sat far from the rivers of their youth, God was on the move preparing to empower them – to create a national identity that more closely reflected the idea that God had desired for Israel from the very beginning. All that God needed was a leader who would be willing to honor him – and as strange an idea as this would have been for the exiles to try to understand, that leader was not going to be found among the kings of Judah. That mouldable leader would actually end up being a series of mouldable leaders that would start with Nebuchadnezzar, the king that ruled by the rivers of Babylon. God was already at work as he began to restore a nation while it mourned what it was that they had lost. And in the future, the seeds of success for the nation would be planted by the rivers of Babylon.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 1