Why Old Men Cry
Ezra 3: “many of the older priests … wept loudly when they saw the foundation of this house.” Why were they crying? Age makes the answer clear.
What do you do when you know, or believe you know, how a thing is going to end?
To grow older is to be in this predicament more and more. The years offer a view to a longer arc of human endeavor, hope, and folly. Ideas that seem new are ideas that have come before, and seemed just as new at that time. To see more is to see more of the way ahead when something is heading toward ending and failure.
The elders in the Old Testament’s book of Ezra saw this, saw in this way. The book’s story is seemingly one of hope. The Lord “put it into the mind of Cyrus” (Ezra 1:1), the king of Persia, to fund and support the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. Descendants of Israelites were called out of exile in Babylon to join the rebuilding. Then there was this detail:
But many of the older priests, Levites, and family leaders, who had seen the first temple, wept loudly when they saw the foundation of this house, but many others shouted joyfully. The people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shouting from that of the weeping, because the people were shouting so loudly. And the sound was heard far away. —Ezra 3:12-13
The older men and women (one imagines the former but the passage also leaves room for the latter) were not just softly sobbing. They were crying. And these were not tears of joy; the passage makes clear the joy was a different and parallel cry. These people cried with anguish so loud that the shouts of joy were rivalled.
What were the elders crying about?
I do not know if I am as old as the average age of this group of priests, Levites, and leaders. Yet I am sufficiently old that I think I can see the answer to this question more plainly than I once might have. Plus, our knowledge of history (the temple falls in 70 AD) makes the answer plainer still. Why were these people crying? Because just such an effort had failed before. The temple was lost before. It was destroyed. And this new effort was no purer, no better. This whole immense, hopeful, expensive effort, just getting started, was going to be dashed upon the rocks of devastating loss. It was all going to happen again.
“Unless the Lord builds a house, its builders labor over it in vain,” says Psalm 127. I think the elders were crying out of the spirit of this Psalm. The text of the book of Ezra takes care to credit the Lord as the source of Cyrus’s idea, but all we see from that point on is the will and machinations of Cyrus—decrees, commands, money, effort. Where was the Lord? We don’t see or hear from the Lord any further in the text of Ezra. The rebuilding is a work of Cyrus. (And then, of King Darius who follows him.)
Where is the Lord?
A sense of the futility of the project settles over Ezra, the priest leading the rebuilding, toward the end of the book bearing his name. As the exiles gather in Jerusalem by the thousands, Ezra comes to understand they are so intermixed with pagan peoples in their marriages, families, habits, and ways that even the very sense of there being a people of God seems to have dissolved into failure. God chose and called out a people, and even what God did seems to have not lasted or held.
Writing part of the book in the first person, Ezra gives this account:
After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, “The people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites…. And in this faithlessness the hand of the leaders and officials has been foremost.” As soon as I heard this, I tore my garment and my cloak and pulled hair from my head and beard and sat down devastated. —Ezra 9:1-3
Where was the Lord? Where even were the Lord’s people?
Here again, an old man crying.
We are on the other side now. We know much about these questions that Ezra could not know. It turns out even older people, with their perspective and view, are limited in the extent of what they can imagine and foresee. And it turns out that—greatest surprise of all—there is a fuller, final, more comprehensive way to sanctification and life. Futility itself is futile. Hope is vindicated after all.
About 500 years after Ezra is when Christ lived, died, and lived. History pressed on: The temple begun under Ezra had only decades left until the Roman siege. But the bigger questions were resolved.
Such as: Where was the Lord? Answer: He had been at work all along. He was preparing to build a temple not of stone, but of people (Mark 13:2, Acts 17:24, Ephesians 3:17).
And: Where are the Lord’s people? Answer: among all nations. The blending of tribes and their ways no longer matters. A temple of people, not of stone.
There is no solution to any of the world’s fundamental problems, no answer to the loss that is coming, except for one solution, one answer, and it is this: that the very Creator would die for the world, would die to make it new.
How far beyond fortunate are we to know something Ezra and the elders did not know. This is the story we get to see: not rebuilding the temple, but rebuilding all creation.
The relief is worthy of weeping in the rare moments we can perceive something like its depth. We cry with gratitude that God sustains the world. We cry, because we know we cannot do it.
Photo: “Shut out the world” by Neil Moralee