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The tragic accounts and pictures from Kabul airport over the last two days testify to the worst of human horrors. Afghans and People from all nations desperate, displaced, dismayed. Fear and confusion evident in faces, voices, actions. It is a gathering – but for one purpose only – a centrifugal one – to flee as fast and as quickly as possible. Anywhere. The tragedy of this panicked multi-ethnic gathering together stands in stark contrast to the Biblical vision of the gathering of all nations. This concrete future hope is repeated across the Hebrew scriptures and Christian New Testament and shared by all the Abrahamic faiths. ‘I am about to gather all nations and tongues, and they will see my glory,’ wrote the prophet Isaiah. The Bible ends, not with a depiction of some abstract spiritual heaven, but with St. John’s vision of the same global unity within a very physical renewed creation, where ‘the nations will walk together in the light of God.’ This vision of coming together is one of hope, not hopelessness, of desire not dismay, and of flourishing together not of fear. It is not one of war and an urge to escape, but of peace and a final homecoming. At the darkest of times, such texts might seem out of touch or hopelessly idealistic. But they were written into communities that also knew war, displacements, lives torn apart by violence. And the message was meant to be practical – to remind their readers in whatever positions they found themselves, of the imperative to understand humankind as one family, with the responsibilities to one another that entails, irrespective of distance, race, gender, nationality or background. The same message can help the international community today to lift its eyes from fruitless recrimination or excuses for inaction, and instead to find a future vision which informs the urgent next steps – to work with the limited range of choices it has, to realise as far it can, in the here and now, the experience of safety, security, the opportunity to help and be helped, which can break in when people of different nations come together. In the Bible the place of that final, fruitful and free gathering is significant – in the symbolism of the texts it is ‘God’s holy mountain’ – but that simply means that it is the place that informs all other places - where the Creator and the once-lost created people fully meet once more. It’s the place where hostilities are healed, and where humans learn to care for each other wherever and whoever they are. It is the place where we become at last fully human again.