The Strange Intimacy of Exile

In a chapter entitled “Disciplines of Readiness” found within his Cadences of Home, Walter Brueggemann articulates an understanding of all God’s people as “a people [always] on the way”(110, italics mine). This journey-bound existence comprehensively characterizes the experience of those following God on earth. For Brueggemann, this journey includes three divinely directed phases: God’s sovereign promise, God’s sovereign demand, and God’s sovereign absence. At first glance, God’s sovereign absence seems to lie at the nadir. In God’s sovereign promise, the very “voice of God initiates the journey” away from “bondage, barrenness, oppression, and marginality” and leads them, albeit circuitously, toward the Promised Land (110). God’s sovereign demand draws Israel away from their idolatrous self-sufficiency and leads them back to intimacy with God. In both of these phases, God seems highly engaged, actively involved in leading and forming a people. Conversely, God’s sovereign absence seems to denote a literal distance from God.

So … what is the purpose of God’s sovereign absence? Is it to punish, shame, humble, or ignore the people of God? Is it to thrust the people of God back into a state of being “bereft, barren, powerless, without hope in the world” (112)? Punitive aims certainly are possibilities, but Brueggemann argues in favor of a surprising mission made possible by God’s sovereign absence. Brueggemann claims that exile, or God’s sovereign absence, teems with the potential for God’s sovereign newness to burst forth. The people of God within God-given exile are uniquely primed to engage in “fresh, imaginative theological work” (116). Brueggemann’s surprising, yet thoroughly biblical, claim about exile is that God is still with his people: “There is for Israel no journey without this God, but this God insists that the journey be one of a very specific kind, a journey of risk, trust, and obedience” (112, italics mine). So for the church of old and new, may we remember the God who is always present:

Psalm 139:7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.”