Beyond Tragedy

Text: Nehemiah 8:1-10

Comedy is when what never could have been, happens. The quarreling neighbors fall madly in love. The powerful CEO is displaced by the poor office boy. A queen falls in love with a donkey. In the end, every impediment is removed and every error undone, and all live happily forever.

Tragedy is when what should have been, does not happen. The lovers pass by one another unknowing. The good people’s uprising is crushed. The queen mistakenly condemns her only child to death. Things go wrong, opportunities are missed, and in the end there is only sorrow and regret. In the theater, the seed is a fatal flaw. Pride, greed, jealously, and the evils we all are subject to. In life, the fates are as much to blame.

In tragedy, there is that moment when all that is good suddenly goes sour. When you do the thing you shouldn’t. Or skip the thing you should. You speak rashly, you drive carelessly, you act impulsively. You don’t bother to lock the lock, put on the safety guards, make the phone call. People are harmed. Relationships broken. The damage is done. And you think: if only I could go back in time just a moment, just a few seconds even. If only I could undo what I have done. I take it back. But there is no taking back. No undo.

Why is this story we just heard in the book of Nehemiah so wrenching? So moving? Ezra the priest reads the book of the law of Moses. All around him are all the people of Jerusalem. All the men and women and all who could hear with understanding. He reads the law—probably the Torah or portions of it—it takes most of the day. And all the people stay to hear him. And when he is done reading, the people weep. They fall to the ground, and weep. In a way that is hard to explain, we know why they weep, and we weep with them. There has been unnecessary sorrow. A tragedy has happened.

This story in Nehemiah starts about 150 years earlier. Let’s flash back to then. It is just before the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the people taken in exile to Babylon. How could God—the same God who had brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and had brought them to Israel hundreds of years before—how could that God let the people be captive once more and removed from that land? How could that be? Some said that God had been displeased. That the people themselves had done something to cause God to abandon them. The story in the Bible—in the books of Kings, mostly—is that it was the people and their rulers who had abandoned God. They ignored the law for centuries, and eventually they just forgot about it.

Just before the end, just before the final invasion by the Babylonians, one good king—his name was Josiah—finds an old copy of the Torah, the law, in a dusty corner of the Temple. It is found by a kind of accountant. This is like not knowing the Bible exists until one of Faith’s counters comes across a dusty copy in the back of the office downstairs. Amidst all the junk. Josiah reads the book. He is shocked. He is dismayed. He tears his clothes. He weeps. He realizes what Israel has done. “The wrath of the Lord is kindled against us,” he says, “because our ancestors did not obey the words of this book, to do according to all that is written concerning us.”

Josiah immediately begins to reform the nation. And in a gathering much like the one we are talking about in Nehemiah, he reads the book of the law of Moses to all the people. Much as Ezra later did. To all the people, small and great, it says. If only the wickedness and inattention could be reversed. But this is a tragedy, it is too late. Too little, too late. The errors of the kings cannot be undone. So the land is conquered and the people carried off and the Temple, God’s house, is destroyed.

End of flashback. We are now with Nehemiah, 150 years later. Babylon itself has been conquered. The people of Israel have been returned to their land. The Temple has been rebuilt. And Nehemiah has repaired the walls of the city. The bones of the city have been restored. But the soul of the city is still missing. The life, the purpose of the city comes from God. It is God’s city, the Temple is God’s house. So the reading of book of the law of Moses is like the breath of life. As with the dry bones in Ezekiel that are brought to life by God’s breath, the city is brought back to life by the presence of God embodied in God’s word.

Why do the people weep? They have emerged from a tragedy. They have come home. Not that the tragedy has been undone. You can’t do that. But the future, thought to be lost, has been restored. They weep like a parent or spouse weeps when the soldier comes home from war. When the runaway child comes back (as with the father of the prodigal son). When the estranged lover returns for another try. These are complicated tears. They are part continuing sorrow at what has gone before; part anger at the suffering people have endured; part resentment of God who left them, they think, in the first place.

And part relief that the ordeal is mostly over; that anxiety has been lifted; that the unexpected but silently hoped-for thing has happened. Part that God is back with them and they with God. What was broken is being restored. So they first weep. And then they celebrate.

For the people gathered at the gate in Jerusalem, the law is life. It is not a legalistic code of shall-nots. The law is a glimpse into the mind of God. It is God’s idea, what God is thinking about. It is information about God, a clue. The word for the law we are talking about here is also translated “teaching” or “instruction.” Knowing what God is thinking is a privilege and a joy. It is guidance. As it says famously in Psalm 119: You word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my path. Or in today’s psalm, “the statutes of the Lord are just and rejoice the heart. [They are] clear and give light to the eyes.” They teach people how to live.

That is always the question. How should we live? And the second question is: how shall we know how we should live?

It seems sometimes as if we are in the midst of a tragedy ourselves. A lot of things are not working out so great in this world. And maybe in our lives. And maybe we wonder, as the Israelites did, whether it is something we have done wrong or not done right. What will happen? Will there be a day when, like Josiah, we weep and wear sackcloth because it is too late? Or will we rejoice because God is with us? Jesus, in another parallel to the stories of Josiah and Ezra, stands at the Temple and reads the Bible. He quotes the prophets. There is good news, he said, for the poor, and the sick, and the prisoners, and the oppressed. Can things that are broken be restored? It is not too late, Jesus says.

Tragedy cannot be turned into comedy. What is done is done. But tragedies often end in hope. The sorrow is not wiped away, but the story, the path, does not end. In the theater there is resolution, acceptance. In life, we go forward. Not forgetting the past, but forgiving it.

The Israelites stand at the new, restored wall of Jerusalem. At first they weep for all that could have been but never was, and for all that was that never should have been. And then. Then they celebrate with a great party, eating and drinking and giving food and drink away and, as it says, making great rejoicing.

The joy of the Lord was in them. The phase is ambiguous. Is it God’s joy in creation and humanity that led God to show us how to live? Or is it the people’s joy in God that God did not abandon us to our own often-faulty advice? Or is that God is always with us. And that the direction of creation is not separation and destruction but reconciliation and healing. Evidently God takes no pleasure in our sorrow but rejoices in our healing.

God does not abolish all that has happened. God does not prevent tragedy. God does not turn back the clock. The people turn to God looking for strength to continue. But contrary to what we might suspect, they do not look to God’s power, or to God’s wisdom, or even to God’s goodness. Rather, they have learned that God is joyful and that God takes joy in us. And therefore we can take heart and be hopeful.

God is with us. God guides us in our lives. And against brokenness and tragedy, it is the joy of God that is our strength.