When the Crying and the Cheering Got Mixed Up

In the spring of the second year after the long walk home from Babylon,
the builders on Jerusalem's hill
set the last stone of the new temple's foundation
and stepped back to look.

A long floor of fresh-cut stone, square and level,
with weeds still growing round the edges.
There were no walls yet, and no roof,
only the bottom of God's house, waiting for the rest.

So the priests put on their robes
and lifted their silver trumpets,
and the Levites from Asaph's family picked up their cymbals.
(King David had written down, hundreds of years before,
who should play what in God's house,
and they still did it his way.)

The trumpets blared.
The cymbals went CRASH!
And the singers began, one side calling, the other side answering:

"Praise the LORD, for he is good!"
"His love for Israel lasts forever!"
"He is good!"
"His love lasts forever!"

Then all the people shouted,
a shout so big it rolled down the hill
and bounced off the broken city walls.
Children jumped. Mothers clapped.
Somebody's baby woke up and joined in.
(The families had brought 6,720 donkeys home from Babylon,
and every one of them laid its ears back.)

But along the edge of the crowd stood the old ones,
gray-bearded priests and Levites and grandfathers
who had been children when the first temple stood.
They remembered King Solomon's house,
cedar walls and gold that shone like morning.
They remembered the day the soldiers of Babylon
burned it to the ground.

They looked at the new stones
and saw how much plainer this house would be.

"It was not like this," one of them said.
"You should have seen it."

And the old men began to cry,
loudly, with their faces in their hands.

So the shouting and the crying went up together,
glad voices and grieving voices,
until nobody could tell which was which.
If you had stood on a far-off hill that morning,
you would have heard one enormous noise
and never known whether Jerusalem was laughing or weeping.
The Bible says the sound was heard far away.

And over both kinds of voices rang the same song:
he is good, and his love lasts forever.
It lasted for the ones who had lost so much.
It lasted for the ones just beginning.

But a foundation is only the bottom of a house.
This one would never shine like Solomon's,
and even on its happiest morning, somebody was crying.
The old ones died, the young ones grew old,
and God's people kept singing,
with laughing and crying mixed up in their throats.

Then a builder from Nazareth came to Jerusalem.
"You will weep," he told his friends,
"but your sorrow will turn into joy."
They wept when he died,
and a great stone was set across his tomb.
But on the third day the stone was rolled away,
and the women ran from the empty grave
afraid and full of joy, both at once,
and the news was heard far away.
Jesus was alive.

One day God himself will live with his people, and there will be no more crying,
and the cheering will have nothing mixed into it at all.