Daniel – living as exiles

by Margaret Killingray (Word for the Week 15-1-07)

Then the king (in Babylon) commanded his palace master to bring some of the Israelites of the royal family and of the nobility, young men without physical defect and handsome… endowed with knowledge and insight.  Daniel 1:3,4

Fit, handsome, privileged, with top drawer education, four self confident young men stride into a London firm to start work and after hours London would be their playground.  A week into their new jobs they are transferred to the firm’s headquarters in a country far from home.  They don’t know the language, their colleagues are suspicious, and their social habits give offence, particularly those relating to alcohol and women.  For the first time they are no longer comfortable, no longer able to read the culture, no longer able to communicate freely.

Daniel and his friends were transferred from Jerusalem to Babylon, to permanent exile from home.  Family, culture, language, traditions, and above all the familiar practices, places and rituals of the worship of their God were stripped away.  

On the whole humans do not ‘do’ exile very well.  Much of our sense of well-being depends on patterns and routines that we know, places and homes where we are comfortable, people with whom we are easy.  And great adventures and gap years are the more enjoyable for knowing that home is waiting for us.  

When we are suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into an unfamiliar landscape where we are no longer sure of ourselves, our self-confidence as well as our God-confidence can be knocked sideways.  But we don’t always have to travel to find ourselves in unfamiliar landscape. Radical change comes to us so that we are ‘exiles’ in our own once familiar world.  Illness, injustice, loss of work, bereavement, or technological change can make ‘home’ unfamiliar.  (Even welcomed change – marriage, first child, retirement or the job we always wanted, can upset our equilibrium and make us feel no longer at home.)

Yet ‘exile’ is one of the biblical pictures of our lives on earth- aliens and strangers in the world (1Peter 2:11), not having an enduring city, but looking for the city that is to come (Heb 13:14), citizens of heaven, not of earth (Phil 3:20).  Rescued from slavery, we are led on a journey, always in temporary accommodation, onwards to a perfect home and until we get there we are never totally at home.

How did Daniel respond to exile?  How should we?