The entrance to the Dub around noontime or the end of the day can be a fairly high-traffic place, what with the parents coming to retrieve their day care children or us office workers going for our sports. Often when I am either a sweaty mess or a mass of unreleased anxiety, I will notice this person or that trying to navigate the multiple doorways. In attempting to help them out, and by so doing subserving my needs to theirs, do I become codependent? Of course not, nor do I automatically become a nice guy. What really happens is that we all get through the door faster.
Because each of us trying to get where we are going on our own without considering the people around us will lead to chaos and confusion. So it is at the Dub and so it was in Babylon, apparently. Jeremiah (speaking, we assume, for Godalmighty) tells the Israelites in captivity to try to get along with their captors. “Plant trees,” he says. “Have kids.” “Work for the good of the city where you find yourself.”
“Why? What has Nebuchadnezzar done for me except drag me across the desert and plop me down in the middle of Iraq?” Most Israelis were, at this point, about bashing babies heads against the rocks. (cf. The Medlodians, “By The Rivers of Babylon”) This is a feeling which I can dig. Who among us has not wanted to smash a head, or at least call a cop, when the situation was not going our way. The point, however, is that once we find ourselves in Babylon, “in it’s welfare you will find your welfare.” Some have argued that the Jews found more than mere welfare, that they learned again what it meant to be Jews. Wherein lies the lesson that my salvation is directly connected to yours.