The City in Ruins
Most of the time when we picture the city of Jerusalem, we imagine it plentifully inhabited. It is estimated that nearly a million people live in the city now. Certainly, it was an important local city in the time of Jesus. Though it wasn’t the provincial capital, the presence of the temple made it an important site for the religion. They needed the infrastructure and manpower to support all the pilgrims that came for festivals. While it wouldn’t have been anywhere near the population today, estimates range from 50,000 to 75,000 for the time of Jesus. We may imagine back to the time of the Davidic Monarchy, when the city was the capital of the united kingdom of Israel and then the kingdom of Judah after Solomon’s son Rehoboam divided the kingdom. The population at this time was still large enough for major building projects such as expanding the city and constructing Hezekiah’s tunnel. We want to imagine that once Jerusalem became God’s chosen city, it was always a bustling, lively place where the people faithfully worshiped the LORD. Of course, we also know that couldn’t possibly be true.
We don’t have precise numbers for how many people were taken from the city during the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. Some people would have been killed, some would have been exiled, some would have fled the city, and some would have remained among the ruins. After the fall, a group of survivors migrated to Egypt according to Jeremiah 42 and 43. Some may have scattered to the countryside. When we read Ezra and Nehemiah, we imagine thousands of people returning to Jerusalem, but the archaeological evidence suggests that the population in Jerusalem during the Persian period was disturbingly low. The number that floats around in a few papers is 400. That wouldn’t have even been enough to fill a single section of the city. That’s the population you would expect in a small farming community in the Midwest with a single rail road running through it, not a city that had been the capital of a kingdom for hundreds of years.
The gates had been burned and walls had been damaged. Though many of the houses had probably been hurt, they wouldn’t have been completely flattened. They would stand abandoned, ghostly reminders of all the people who had once lived there, now empty and silent, half-ruined shells. By night, the small community would gather together and hear the cries of wild animals from inside the walls of the city, foxes, wild dogs, maybe even larger predators hunting among the houses and streets that had once been so full of human life. Every time you would walk into or out of the city would be a reminder of a past defeat, itself a reminder of the people’s unfaithfulness. Wandering around the city during the day—it would be too dangerous by night to wander alone—you may see the ruins of the temple, Solomon’s greatest project, the place where your people had gone to meet with God, now lying in silent ruins, the echoes of glory cut short by catastrophe, with wild animals running through the rubble.
When Isaiah 61 speaks about the community building up “the ancient ruins,” this is the image we should have in mind. The community is impossibly small compared with the task at hand, and the ruins around them are a source of both insecurity and shame. Not only do they need to be afraid of bandits hiding out within the walls and lions stalking the streets, but they must also bear the shame of their ancestors. Their “noble” forefathers had given them this mess through their idolatry and arrogance. Now the people had been scattered and broken, with no clear leader or path forward, dwelling in the terrible uncertainty that God may have abandoned them forever.
The reason this is important to contextualize is that we run the risk of reducing the profundity of this passage by not appreciating how much they had lost. We don’t think much about rebuilding our ruins and former devastations. In America, we are blessed with mostly continuous success. While we have certainly fallen on hard times throughout our history, and you can find ghost towns from economic booms and busts, we don’t see cities here where war and exile has reduced the population and left it a haunted waste. We thrill ourselves with disaster movies that show us these images on the big screen, but we don’t have to deal with the devastation in real life. For the most part, we don’t know what it is to wander through a home city that is completely destroyed and ponder all the mistakes that must have been made to get to this point.
Nonetheless, there are still ways we can connect with these images. On the one hand, we can imagine the shock of losing not only a city but also the beloved glorious history of our past. Imagine if Washington DC fell to an enemy, and we had to come to terms with the reality that it wasn’t just a matter of some clever trick by a foreign power, but rather the failures of our government and military, of all the institutions that we relied upon. What if the fall of a city meant not only the loss of life, but the shattering of the view we had of our country? If we could no longer pretend that we were safe, that we were the “good guys” in the world? It wouldn’t simply be a matter of destruction of life and property, but our entire patriotic belief system would be called into question.
Furthermore, we can acknowledge that while this doesn’t happen in America, it does happen around the world. Where wars rage throughout the globe, cities and villages are evacuated, leaving behind only shells. People are forced to flee and take refuge in places where the culture is different. They need to learn how to survive where people don’t speak the same language as them, and some bigoted people hate or fear them simply because they are different in a way that they don’t understand. This is the grim reality of our world. We are insulated in the United States, but the unimaginable horrors of Biblical times are still part of the life stories of many people alive today.
This passage from Isaiah addresses the full depths of the pain, shame, and loss. It isn’t just your home that is being rebuilt, it is the “ancient ruins” and “former devastations.” Those hopes and dreams that had been lost, national pride and identity, even the relationship with God that had been squandered by generations of arrogant idolatry are restored. By God’s grace, we can hope that even amidst the disaster of the cruel things we do to one another, even in the face of ghost cities abandoned by war and exile, even in the crushing despair of hopelessness, still God calls us to remember the Gospel. No matter how dire the situation, God hasn’t given up on us.
