Longing for Jerusalem

Reminders of Home come at unexpected times, in unexpected places

They say you can see Jerusalem from Mount Nebo. But I’ve never quite been able to. I’ve driven up there several times, stood at the peak, and looked out over the desert. You can easily make out the Jordan River valley, a green swath in the brown desert, and Jericho is clearly visible. But the Holy City always seems to be obscured by a desert haze on the horizon. No doubt you could see it on a completely clear day. But I think you would have to get rid of all the sand for that to happen.

It must have been an especially clear day when God led Moses up Mount Nebo. As Moses looked out over the Promised Land, he was able to see the region of Jerusalem and even beyond. But he was not allowed to cross the river. He died then and there, trapped in the desert.

Far-Off Music

A while back, I drove out in that same desert for a cookout with a bunch of Sudanese guys. On the way back, as we drove through the night, one of the guys put the popular dance song “Jerusalema” on over the speakers. It was the first time I had heard it. The song is in Zulu, so the only word I could understand was Jerusalema.

But I knew the song was about the Heavenly City. How could it not be, the way she sang that word, Jerusalema? The longing in the singer’s voice transcended language. Surely anyone who has felt that longing could understand it, with or without any knowledge of Zulu.

And, sure enough, when I looked up a translation, I saw that the words of the song are a prayer:

Jerusalem is my home
Keep me safe
Walk with me
Do not leave me here
Jerusalem is my home
Keep me safe
Walk with me
Do not leave me here

My place is not here
My kingdom is not here
Keep me safe
Walk with me
My place is not here
My kingdom is not here
Keep me safe
Walk with me

Keep me safe
Keep me safe
Keep me safe
Do not leave me here

“Jerusalema” became a massive international hit in 2020, after a dance-challenge went viral on social media. Of course, most people didn’t realize they were dancing to a prayer. Rolling Stone quotes a Spotify handler:

A lot of people in South Africa don’t even know what’s being said in the song… The vocalist is saying ‘Oh, Jerusalema [the heavenly city], you’re my home. This is not my home.’ That’s the spirit of what’s been happening during COVID and quarantine. The lyrics are literally saying, ‘Take me to a better place.’ It’s just amazing how well it translated through the actual feeling of escapism and the wanting of a better place and a better time.

Perhaps the language barrier was why it was allowed to slip through the cracks. Songs about “going to heaven” aren’t usually considered pop-hit material. For that matter, even Christian worship songs these days don’t talk about our eternal home with God nearly as much as the hymns of a generation or two ago did; they’re mostly about what God can do for you now, in this life – as if this life were not merely an entryway of Eternity. “This world is not my home/I’m just a-passin’ through/My treasures are laid up/Somewhere beyond the blue” just doesn’t land right on our ears – even though every line is biblical. We are strangers and exiles on this earth, and only in the eternal country will we find a home. On the day of resurrection, when everything fleeting in the world has passed away for good, and what was found to be permanent is brought to life again – then we will end our wandering. Not before.

But the fact is, any acknowledgement of an eternal dwelling goes against the spirit of our times, which insists that this temporal world is our home. If we claim to have another home, we are being escapist. And being escapist is bad.

Escapism and Stay-Here-ism

In his essay “On Science Fiction,” C.S. Lewis said of the distaste for “escapism”:

I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most pre-occupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

Those who don’t want us to think about another place are serving (usually subconsciously) the great jailer of our world. He does not want us to escape. The necessary first step to escaping any prison is merely to think about another place, outside the prison. After that, of course, it remains to be seen whether that place exists, and whether escaping to it will be possible or not. But if you don’t even let your thoughts stray outside the prison, you’ll never begin to try to escape.

It can be interesting to judge a work – book, movie, song – or a body of works by the same creator, on the standard of whether or not it stirs up – or even acknowledges – a longing for our true Home. The books, movies, and songs that pass this test aren’t always the ones you would expect, and neither are the ones that fail it. If you make a habit of applying this litmus test, you may notice that not everything that seems at first glance to be on the right side of the contemporary “culture war” passes the test, and not everything apparently on the wrong side fails it.

Merely being part of one group or another won’t necessarily make you immune to the insidious spiritual amnesia endemic to this world. You can be a pastor or a priest, and still forget about Home. That’s not surprising, because somebody wants us to forget. “We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” (1 John 5:19) Somebody cannot stand the idea of any place beyond his domain, cannot stomach that humans would believe in an eternal dwelling place. So he will always try to influence us to see this world, this life, as our home.

But this world is not our home. God made this universe good; he did not make it permanent. The heavens (i.e. the cosmos) “will vanish like smoke” (Isaiah 51:6), they will “disappear with a roar” (2 Peter 3:10). God will “once more” shake the heavens and the earth, removing all created things, so that only the unshakeable will remain (Hebrews 12:26-27). The earth and heavens will flee from the presence of God, and there will be no place for them (Revelation 20:11).

Modern science agrees. Physicists may debate whether the universe will dissipate into “heat-death” (a permanent dead state with no energy, light, or movement) or collapse into the heat and pressure of a reverse Big Bang, but they tend to agree on one thing – it won’t last forever. And of course, even if it could, our lives in it could not. Everything in this world will die.

We know all this, deep down. Nothing can make us forget it completely. Just when we do begin to forget, some major disruption like the COVID-19 pandemic comes along and reminds us of the truth buried deep inside us – that this world cannot be our home, not for long. We see that our life on this earth is a sinking ship, that if we cling to it we will perish with it. These disruptions always cause angst, or even despair, in society. But every so often, something – perhaps a song, or a story, perhaps a vista, perhaps an act of kindness – catches us off guard and reminds us of another truth, a truth buried even deeper inside us. Once in a while – in spare moments, here and there, in the quiet of our hearts – the haze clears, and our souls catch a glimpse of the heavenly city, far-off and yet nearby.

Jerusalema.