For whom the bell tolls
2 Chronicles 33
Only our nightmares today fully illuminate the losses endured in the ancient world. Living in a world where armies appear out of the darkness, ransack your home, murder loved ones, and take you away into slavery is unrelatable to our modern experience. The Lost Tribe of Manasseh, a group of Jewish people wiped from history by war and darkness suffered this fate. Ensuring captives remain docile and acquiescent; they are issued new names, and every bit of their culture is stripped away. It was confusing, tumultuous, and depressing. Two centuries later, in 550 BCE, the rest of the Jewish people are facing similar circumstances.
Our author, known to history only as “the Chronicler,” is a man living under such conditions. His one and only desire is to see his people return home from their bondage and live again in peace. For years he is writing the history of his people, laboring to tell their inspiring and tragic story. In the famous words of John Donne, he is laboring to show, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Facing extreme cultural extermination, he needs the corporate response of the masses. And so, he chronicles the diminutive history of King Manasseh, a man whose name is culturally synonymous with a lost people.
King Manasseh begins his reign following all of the pagan gods. His devoutness is so extreme he sacrificed his own children to the gods. He leads the people in following foreign gods, neglecting their long-held culture and the God of Abraham. What follows is eerily familiar to the Chronicler. Manasseh is taken in chains and hooks to the distant Assyrian capital city of Babylon. In Babylon, he has a change of heart and “in his distress he sought the favor of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors” (v.12). Returning to his kingdom a changed man, Manasseh rebuilds the walls of his cities. He removes the foreign gods and restores worship to the God of Abraham. He does all this and, in the end, he is blessed to “rest with his ancestors and was buried in his own palace” (v.20). His life story is the symbolic story the Chronicler desires for his people.
These simple stories tell of a lost people. The first story of the Lost Tribe of Manasseh is a cautionary tale of people vanished to history and time, swallowed up in a pagan culture. The second story, a deported king, returning home and symbolically acting as the hope and redemption for a people. But there is a third story. St. Matthew lists another king in the line of King Manasseh. This king also set forth a path for his people. But this king is neither cautionary nor symbolic. He showed his people their true identity in the world. He told his people they are lost in bondage, but there is hope for them. He came and actively shows the path home. Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the lost tribe, He is the fulfillment of the Jewish salvation, He is our fulfillment as gentiles. Like a bell ringing in the distance, the story of Manasseh proclaims the good news to the land. ‘And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ – John Donne
Post Script In Tudor and Stewart England the tolling of church bells signified all kinds of life events. Donne is referring to the funeral bells resulting from the clash between Protestants and Catholics. I chose to use his poem in this piece because Donne and the Chronicler both focus on the unity of faith in a Judeo-Christian God. At the end of the poem, the tolling bell’s greatest significance is as a funeral bell for Christ, paradoxically proclaiming good news.
Dad Devotional 