Come, O Desire of Nations, Come

The spirituality of the Jews is one of sober yearning: "As the deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God" (Ps 42:1-2). Indeed, the descendants of Israel still hope for the coming of the Messiah and the rebuilding of the Temple, that very dwelling place of God's presence on earth; they desire, long for, and await the coming of their king and they yearn to encounter the divine face in His holy place. Accordingly, to some extent, they are to be admired for not being satisfied with the transitory things of this world for, as many others have been distracted by such things that lead us away from seeking the face of God, the Jews have remained steadfast in their search for something more perennial than immediate, short-lived pleasures. It is to their merit that they recognize man's dislocation in this our disjointed world where the stable and eternal face of God alone can bring comfort and peace. They are to be commended for holding fast to the hope that help will come to them in some future event orchestrated by God that will set things aright.

The Jewish man finds himself in a position where he can be comforted in his long exile from a just world insofar as he patiently awaits a future act from on High. He can "lift up [his] eyes to the hills" (Ps 121:1) whence his help will come- in some distant location, at some distant time. His trust in God's promise of setting things right again is not shaken by a failure to meet an imminent deadline of rescue for, as long as that hope remains abstract in the ‘hills of time’, he can patiently cope with the struggles of this world knowing that God will indeed send help…some time, some where.

However, his current position seems to be not much different than Moses and the Israelites before in Egypt. Having once successfully left the land of their bondage, how often did they return to it with no certainty of definitively leaving it behind? The records of the failure of judge after judge, the disloyalty of king after king, the destruction of temple after temple, seems to place the post-Passover Jew back before his great deliverance from Mitzraim. His help may come in the future again, but who is to say that he will definitively be saved from enslavement? Who is to say that upon being freed from Pharaoh he will not long once again to sit "by the fleshpots and [eat] bread to the full" back with him in his dominion (c.f. Ex 16:3)? The story of the Jews seems to be one of a pursuit after God with seemingly no end, a courtship that leads to the Promised Land, but where the Beloved is never fully possessed. It is a story that to this day has no foreseeable plans of temple reconstruction and hence, no foreseeable conclusion.

The Christian however finds himself in an altogether different situation of faith. Indeed, the Christian's help has come many years ago during the reign of Tiberius Caesar; his courtship is already in possession of his Beloved whenever he answers affirmatively to His simple invitation: “Come, follow Me” (Mt 19:21); the conclusion of his story has already been written from a cave on the island Patmos.

Yet, amid the good news of the Gospel the Christian has accepted, he still finds himself existing in the same world that the Jewish person finds himself in- a world full of natural and moral evils. Far from being snatched away from suffering’s hold by accepting Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, the Christian, although having known the answer, still must continually grapple with the reality of the question: How to continue along the way of hope amidst pain, sin, and sorrow on all sides?

The Jew can say that in the future when the Messiah comes, cancer will be eradicated, famines will give way to rain, vice will be subjugated, the abuse of innocence will be righted, the shell-shock of the soldier will gently cease, sin will be rejected, the loneliness of man will be no more. In some distant time when the Messiah does finally arrive, all these things will be accomplished.

But the Christian is left to ponder why this vale of tears still exists even though his Messiah has already come. The irony of Christ finally fixing things on the cross only to abruptly descend into the depths of hell boggles the mind of not only a non-believer but of the Christian as well. The glory of the transfiguration on Mt. Tabor is followed by the tragedy of the crucifixion on Mt. Calvary; the ransom won by Christ's death is followed by His entrance into the prison of Sheol; His resurrection and return from the land of the dead is followed by the suffering and martyrdom of His followers. When then will goodness be unfollowed by evil? Will evil always have the last say?

As the Jew is taught his hope lies in the future, the Christian is taught that even though his hope has already come in the past he must still bear his cross in the present as a means of dealing with evil's lingering grip. Indeed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer could not have said it clearer when he preached: "To bear the cross proves to be the only way of triumphing over suffering."[1] But, this must be an unfortunate triumph indeed, if bearing crosses is still necessary!

Hence, the situation as we have it is this: on the one hand, the Jew still awaits the Messiah and, on the other hand, the Christian has announced His arrival 2,000 years- but, regardless of their drastically differing perspectives, both Jewish and Christian hands alike are wounded by lives of suffering and, as far as suffering is concerned, they are both undeniably in the same boat. Is it fair to say then that even though the Messiah has already come for the Christians, they are at the end of the day any better off than the Jews who can still fall back on their anticipant future hope of deliverance- while Christians are left to wallow in a supposed past victory? Indeed, could it not be argued that perhaps when help is eventually received by the Jews, they might be in an altogether better position than the Christian who must continue down through the centuries suffering- wondering if the triumph claimed on the cross had any real effect on the evil that pervades his world.

These might be reasonable assumptions to make if it were not for the faith of the Christian making the story a bit clearer. For the Christian finds himself in a unique position where he can fruitfully deal with the suffering of the present knowing that his Messiah has joined him in his anguish; but, in addition to this present action, like the Jew, he too can look to the hills of the future as He awaits the final victory of the Messiah's coming "to reconcile to Himself all things"(Col 1:20). For the expectation of the Second Coming of Christ bringing definitive victory over the disorientation of the world is buttressed by the victory of love He had already won on Golgotha centuries before. The Christian's understanding of salvation history then is a fluid movement from the past, to the future, back to the present, because he sees the defeat of evil, sin, and death as something that already happened in the past, something that will happen in the future, and something that must happen now in the present. This sort of outlook sees God's help from on High as having been sent, as something to be sent, and as something being sent- a help that encompasses all time and space, a help coexistent with God Himself. Nothing less than this holistic past-present-future trust in God can suffice in bringing comfort to us in this world with all its evils. It is only by possessing this sight we can see God all around us as the Author, Actor, and End of our rescue. It is only by recognizing His Christ as both the triumphant Son who will return with a rod of iron and the suffering servant who became our Brother and was like us in all ways accepting death even death that man can have a real hope for reconciliation between the fallenness of creation with the perfection of its Lord.

But, in spite of the fact that Jews and Christians cannot see with the same lens on who Jesus is, we can still continue to pray together the same psalms of longing that, although differ in context, share the same intent: a plea for help to come from on High. "How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?"(Ps 13:1)

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R.H, Fuller (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1963), 101.