Diaspora as Exile. The Prophetic Biblical Text — a Missionary Solution for Contemporaneity
The revealed message of Holy Scripture is, over the centuries, a divine call to the fulfillment of God's will, to which man must respond with faithfulness, piety and humility, with true love and wisdom. The Old Testament, as a prophetic text, warns that the disobedience to the Lord’s Law and leaving the Covenant determine the pedagogical intervention of God, characterized as the removal of the pronation and "alienation" of the Glory from the Temple and people. In reality, it is not the Lord Who is exiled, but the unbelieving man chooses the coercive action of exile, living the dramatic experience of diaspora. In this context, the role of the prophets is to prepare the people for the new experience, encouraging them to take responsibility for the guilt of sin, to seek the personal good of the family and the community, as well as the host people, to wait with hope and working faith for the time of eliberation and of return home, as God's renewed people. The experience of the Jewish diaspora in Babylonian exile could thus be a missionary solution for contemporaneity. The diaspora of those who have left their's home needs the lessons of ancient history to understand, not only socially and economically, but also theologically, their distance from their family, their parental home, their land and people to whom it belongs. At the same time, evaluating the realities of the diaspora communities, we are obliged to identify and implement viable solutions, in the communion of the Church, and in this sense the inspired text is the hermeneutic key of modern times.