“Pilgrims” … Peter writes, “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers (pilgrims – KJV) to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.” What is a pilgrim, a stranger? The linguistic history of this word (Greek: parepidemos) reveals an interesting relationship between the stranger and those around him. One lectionary puts it this way: Between the stranger and those around him there is reciprocal tension. He is a man from without, strange, hard to fathom, surprising, unsettling, sinister. But to the stranger his odd and different environment is also disturbing and threatening. There thus arises mutual fear…

It is into this reality that Peter says every Christian is introduced. And so it has always been with God’s children. When the exiles of Babylon were allowed to return to their homeland – they return, not as citizens of a nation that is their own, but as strangers, pilgrims, in a land that now belongs to the Persians. Jerusalem, the once holy city of God, is now an outlier province under the rule of a pagan king.