This story begins with a homemaking God who creates a world for inhabitation. This God is a primordial homemaker, and creation is a home for all creatures. For the human creature, however, the divine homemaker plants a garden. This God is one with perpetually dirty fingernails, a God who is always playing in the mud. The human creature is created out of the earth (human from the humus) in the image and likeness of this homemaking and garden-planting God, and thus a creature called to be a homemaking gardener. Humans are “placed” in a garden home that they receive as a gift; they are called to tend and keep this home, to continue to construct this world as home in such a way that cares for all creatures and provides a place of secure habitation for all of its inhabitants.
Creation is home, and humans are stewardly caretakers of this creational home. This is the most foundational and (literally) grounding memory of biblical faith (Gen 1–2). Without this memory, there could be no going home, there could be no vision of homemaking, no way beyond our present homelessness.
The biblical story does not get very far before we have an account of the defilement and despoliation of home. In the story of human disobedience in the garden and the consequent expulsion from Eden, the narrative takes the shape of a tragedy (Gen 3). No longer responding to the call to tend and keep the creational home, Cain murders Abel and in so doing refuses to be his brother’s keeper (Gen 4:1–16, Gen 2:15). This is a story that moves quickly from home to homelessness, from a call to stewardly homemaking to disruptive homebreaking, from a vision of the home’s harmony to a narrative of family violence. Eventually the gardened home becomes a tower of imperial aspirations.
Alienated from God, from themselves, from other humans, and from the earth, humanity misuses its God-given power by fabricating a tower to storm heaven and take God’s place (Gen 11:1–9). If home is a matter of imaging the homemaking and garden-planting God, and of being stewards of the gift of our creational home, the story of the fall into sin is a story of broken stewardship and autonomous home construction. As image-bearers of the homemaking God, humans are incurably homemakers. But now, alienated from this God and striving to construct home outside of a relationship of grateful stewardship, humans construct homes of violence and idolatrous self-protective arrogance. Without grateful stewardship, humans face the fate of homelessness.
The homemaking Creator is not prepared to give up on this creational home and its homebreaking inhabitants. So God makes a covenant. God is so committed to homemaking that after the flood God enters into covenant with the image-bearers and with all of creation. And God does so with the full recognition that his partner in this covenant is a violent homebreaker (Gen 8:20–9:17).
A promised land rejected
If humans are to realize a renewal of home, they must abandon old cultural patterns of home construction. Thus God calls Abraham and Sarah to leave the home of their ancestors and sojourn with the homemaking God toward a new home, a promised land, that they will receive as they received the first home — as a gift (Gen 12:1–2). The story of the patriarchs can then be read as the torturous journey toward this promised home. The promise seems to get stuck in Egypt. Rather than receiving the inheritance of a promised land, a site of homecoming for a sojourning people, the descendents of Abraham find themselves in the homelessness of imperial bondage (Exod 1). The sojourner becomes the slave who is going nowhere, a being who is definitely not at home. It’s hard to have a sense of home when you are subject to the impossible brick quotas of Pharaoh and you are spending your strength and your life building the hegemonic home of someone else’s empire.
In the face of imperial homelessness, however, the homemaking Creator becomes the God of liberation who insists that the people be set free. God hears the cries of his people, remembers his covenant, and acts to set his people free (Exod 2). The anti-creational, home-destroying, and enslaving forces of empire cannot thwart the Creator’s homemaking intentions for his people and his creation (Exod 11–15). The story of the Exodus, then, is a story of liberation from homelessness and slavery in order to be at home again with the covenant-making God, even if that requires being at home in the uninhabitable place of wilderness. This story takes strange turns. This is no garden into which Yahweh has led his people, but it is a place where they can be at home only because the sustaining and liberating Creator dwells with them (Exod 16). For some, this is too risky and too tenuous an experience of home, and they conspire to return to the imperial security of Egypt (Num 14, Exod 16:13). For those people there will be no inheritance. By refusing to be at home with God on God’s terms, and by insisting on the authoritatively controlled and managed home of the empire over the more precarious and risky home of promised gift, they have rejected the covenantal home, forfeited their inheritance, and abandoned hope of any covenantal homecoming.
This story has a wonderful irony. Wilderness is Israel’s most radical memory of landlessness. The wilderness is a site of chaos reminiscent of the “formless void” before the dawn of creation, before this world was created as home. Wilderness is “land without promise, without hope, where no newness can come” because wilderness does not provide the necessary resources for homemaking. And yet it is in the wilderness that Israel learns anew that they must receive home first as a gift before they can ever manage or construct it. In the wilderness, Israel forges new memories with Yahweh, rooted in the old homemaking promises of covenant and creation and in conflict with recent memories of an imperial home.
Covenantal home is home constituted by covenantal word. Homemaking stewardship is predicated on covenantal listening. Thus Israel listens and becomes a people of Torah in the wilderness. Torah is God’s charter for a homemaking people, a manual for covenantal home construction. Do this, says God, and you will flourish in the land. “Torah exists so that Israel will not forget whose land it is and how it was given to us.” Therefore, Torah is breathtakingly comprehensive in its scope: it addresses every dimension of communal life, every dimension of what it means to make this world into a cultural site of homemaking — agricultural practices, building regulations, gender roles, sanitation, ecology, and economic justice.
But it is justice that is at the heart of Torah: “Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Deut 16:20). And Torah seems to be especially preoccupied with justice and protection for those with little or no standing in the community — the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. If there is to be homemaking in Israel, it must be a homemaking of inclusion, not exclusion. The homeless, the vulnerable, the marginal — all must have the room to make home as well (Deut 10:17–19).
That is why Sabbath and Jubilee are the climax of Torah: “Sabbath is a voice of gift in a frantic coercive self-serving world.” And to keep Sabbath is to free slaves, to rest the land, and to cancel debts (Exod 21:1–11; Deut 15:1–18, 22:14; Lev 25:1–55). The year of Jubilee, the 50th year, is a Sabbath of Sabbaths in which the yoke of injustice is broken, institutionalized slavery and expropriation of land is overturned, and the homeless receive their inheritance back so that they will again have the resources of homemaking available to them and their families. In a world of homelessness, violence, injustice, and sin, Jubilee is rooted in atonement and forgiveness. In this covenantal vision of homemaking, debts are forgiven and the possibility of homemaking is renewed.
That was the vision, of course, but the reality was something quite different. Again, this story of homecoming gets lost in a morass of homebreaking violence. This is called the story of the Judges, a story where the two refrains are “the people did what was right in their own eyes” and “the people did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” (Judg 21:25; 3:7). In the midst of such homebreaking, the story of faithful Ruth and covenant-keeping Boaz is a welcome alternative to the sexual violence of Judges. But since not all Israelites are as attuned to Torah as was Boaz, they look elsewhere for home-ordered security. If the judges are too loose of a system for a secure and safe home, then more effective homeland security measures will need to be established.
So the people ask for a king. More specifically, they demand a king — “like the nations” (1 Sam 8:5). If there is a king, secure in his palace, and if that king should also establish a temple to be the home of God, then the political and religious structures will be in place for the rest of the nation to have the sociopolitical and mythic-sacral security to engage in homemaking. But there are at least two problems with this scheme. First, kings tend to provide only the illusion of security under the guise of an authoritarian regime; in fact, they are notorious not for what they give, but for what they take. They take your sons for their armies and for their imperial agricultural and building programs. They take your daughters to be palace servants and to keep the royal harem well stocked. They take your grain and your wine for the imperial household. They take your flocks and herds for their tables. They take your wealth for their treasury (1 Sam 8:10–18). Kings take, take, and take some more. And in the context of such taking, such expropriation and royal control, covenantal homemaking is not possible.
But there is another problem with the imperial vision of homemaking: It requires the domestication of God. If the king is to be secure in his home, and if the royal regime is to be a secure structure of imperial homemaking, then the system will require a god who will provide such sacral legitimacy to the royal vision. It will require a tamed god, safely living next door to the palace in his temple (1 Kings 5–9). But that is not the God of Israel. Thus the necessary and devastating implication of the monarchy in Israel is that the promised land of homecoming devolves into a cursed and idolatrous land of expropriation and homelessness. Imperial homemaking that forgets the liberating memories of Israel necessarily ignores Torah, violates Sabbath, oppresses the poor, and follows idols. Such amnesia can only result in homelessness. So we are still in this dialectic of home/homelessness, land/loss of land, place/displacement. The prophets had a word for such sociocultural, geopolitical, and religio-economic displacement: exile.
A deep and devastating homelessness
Exile is a return to wilderness. It is an experience of radical land loss and hence a fundamental experience of homelessness. Not only are the elite of the land displaced as captives in the midst of the Babylonian Empire, but the religious and political foundations of a royal vision of homemaking are deconstructed. With both the palace and temple destroyed, and both the king and God gone into exile, Israel comes to new depths in its experience of homelessness. They mourn the loss of home in Isaiah 24:10–11. The city of shalom — Jerusalem, the city of the Great King, the very center of homemaking in a covenantal universe — is no longer a place of order and joy, but one of chaos and grief:
The city of chaos is broken down,
every house is shut up so that no one can enter.
There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine;
all joy has reached its eventide;
the gladness of the earth is banished.
In a world of chaos and violence, hospitality is impossible as people attempt to keep the chaos at bay through locked doors. And when joy has reached its eventide, when the history of royal homemaking is over and the very gladness of the earth is banished, it is no wonder that everyone is looking for some cheap wine to dull the pain. No wonder the prophets are singing the blues in Lamentations 1:1–3:
How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
has become a vassal.
She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies.
Judah has gone into exile with suffering and hard servitude;
she lives now among the nations, and finds no resting place.
If home is a resting place, a place of security and comfort, exile is the deepest and most devastating experience of homelessness.
The homemaking and homebreaking memory of Israel is one of radical reversals. The landed royal court will become landless exiles. Those who are securely at home in their fortress-like homes will be homeless. And yet those who are thrust into a barren homelessness will settle down and bear fruit. Jeremiah counsels the exiles in Babylon to make even that exilic situation into home, to “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce … multiply there and do not decrease” (Jer 29:5–6). Walter Brueggemann observes in The Land, a part of the Overtures to Biblical Theology Series:
The assurance is that what had seemed homelessness is for now a legitimate home. What had seemed barren exile is fruitful garden. What seemed alienation is for now a place of binding interaction. His very word redefined a place for placeless Israel. The assurance is that the landless are not wordless. He speaks just when the silence of God seemed permanent. Exile is the place for a history-initiating word.
Just as the creational home comes into being by the Word of God that says, “let there be,” and the wilderness of the Exodus journey becomes home by the sustaining presence and life-giving Word (Torah) of Yahweh, so also is homemaking possible in exile. Where there is a covenantal word and a listening to that word, human beings can experience life as home in creation. Home construction apart from that word will always result in homelessness; that was the painful lesson of exile. But listening to that word empowers us to build houses, to be at home, and to experience fruitfulness even in the barrenness and oppression of exile.
But exile is never the final Word of the covenantal God. That is why the prophets envision a world beyond exile: landedness beyond landlessness. They envision homecoming. Isaiah 40 to 55 is perhaps the most evocative literature of homecoming in the whole Bible. And again, it is all a matter of covenantal word. Believing that God himself sent his people into cruel exile, Isaiah proclaims that the Word of God, rooted in memories of both exodus and creation, will do a new thing and will not return empty:
Thus says God, the Lord
who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk on it.…
Thus says the Creator God, the homemaking God, the God with dirty fingernails, the God of unspeakable intimacy, the God who is your very breath …
I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you.
I am the God of covenant, the God who called your father Abraham. I am the God who liberated you from slavery by my strong arm and took you by the hand through the wilderness wanderings.
I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,
to open eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. (Isa 42:5–7)
Here is a most radical and subversive promise of homecoming. Yes, this God promises that Israel will see the exiles “gather together” and “come to you.” And yes, there is a vision of unspeakable joy when “your sons will come from far away, and your daughters will be carried on their nurses’ arms” (Isa 60:4). But Isaiah’s vision of homecoming is more profound than just a return from exile.
Rather than simply present the exiles with the rhetoric of ultimate victory over their oppressors, this God promises that they will be a covenant to the people and a light to the nations. After all, this is not a local deity but the Creator God speaking here (Isa 40:28, 42:5, 45:18). This God is concerned with all of creation and thus with all of the nations (Isa 56:7). Homecoming, then, must not be yet another attempt to build a home with even higher protective walls; rather, it is a matter of renewed covenant. It is significant that the text does not say that Yahweh will make a covenant with Israel; instead, Yahweh will give Israel to be a covenant to the peoples. The very existence of the people of God — their return home — is to be of service to others. Such an open, hospitable home is the only kind worth having. Indeed, without such an understanding of covenantal homemaking, all of our homebuilding efforts will result in homelessness.
Against all of the evidence, the homemaking God continues to promise a homecoming. And the evidence doesn’t seem to get much better after the exile. Yes, there is a return, and a rebuilding project in Jerusalem will ensue, but a comprehensive vision of covenantal homemaking remains unattainable because Israel continues to live under the oppressive regimes of one empire after another. Once the Babylonians are gone, the Persians take over, and then the Greeks and then the Romans. Under imperial rule, Israel concludes that the promises of return, of an end to exile, and of homecoming, remain unfulfilled. By the time Jesus enters the story, the burning question in Israel is, when will God make good on his promises and bring our exile to an end?
When can we really come home?
Biblically speaking, we can put this question in various ways: When will the homemaking reign of God be realized on earth? When will we experience anew an exodus from our present homeless bondage to the freedom of homemaking? When will the poor and dispossessed hear good news and experience the homecoming reality of Jubilee in their lives? When will we be forgiven for our distorted, broken, and sinful homebreaking? When will the image-bearers of this homemaking God take up their calling to steward of all of creation with faithfulness and integrity?
Sometimes the Sunday school answer, in all of its wonderful simplicity, is correct: Jesus. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the good news,” is Jesus’ proclamation (Mark 1:15). The royal vision of Israel’s failed monarchy was a homebreaking vision. Jesus brings a radically alternative vision of royal rule, a vision that will see him enthroned on an imperial cross. In this vision, the homemaking reign of God is at hand.
Jesus manifests this new vision of homemaking rule in the healing of the sick, the casting out of demons, and the restoration of outcasts. He pays special attention to those who are ritually, symbolically, and socially unclean, and thereby have been rendered deeply homeless. Often he engages in activities that have unmistakable memories of Moses. A crowd is hungry in the wilderness, and he tells them to sit down in groups of 50 and 100. From a meager meal of five loaves and two fish, he feeds the whole crowd of five thousand people, with 12 baskets left over (Mark 6:30–40, Matt 14:13–21, Luke 9:10–17, John 6:1–14). Sustenance in the wilderness? Could this be a new Moses? Could this be a new Exodus? A new pathway home? Might these 12 baskets suggest the reconstitution of Israel?
When Jesus delivers his inaugural sermon in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, in Luke 4:18–19, he finds a Jubilee text in the prophecy of Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
And then Jesus preached the shortest sermon of his career. “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). Today is Jubilee; today is the year of the Lord’s favor; today there is good news for the poor, release for captives, freedom for the oppressed. The folks in Nazareth might not have understood the radical scope of Jesus’ proclamation of Jubilee. Indeed, when they got wind of the idea that this homecoming was not just for them but for all people, including their enemies, and that Jesus’ vision of homecoming was as broad in scope as the covenantal vision of the homemaking Creator, they were prepared to disown him — even murder him (Luke 4:24-29). But there can be no mistaking that this is a vision of Jubilee.
Adapted from Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement, 15th Anniversary Edition by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh ©2023. Reprinted with permission of Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.