The lectionary this fall has given us the gift or misfortune of spending some time with the prophet Jeremiah of 8th century ancient Judah. Jeremiah is not an easy prophet to hang out with because for chapter after chapter he is like someone holding up one of those signs that says, “The End is Near.”
His message is that God has had enough and will bring about the end of apathy and indifference and injustice and idolatrous religion of the powerful. But Jeremiah’s divine call is not just to pronounce doom and gloom and judgment upon a people facing impending destruction and exile into Babylon. Rather, Jeremiah is called to give voice to a grief that no one else wants to acknowledge. Jeremiah is called to express the very grief of God.
As scholar Walter Brueggemann puts it: “Jeremiah has only the hope that the ache of God could penetrate the numbness of history… Tears are a way of solidarity in pain when no other form of solidarity remain.”1
Please pray with me: Holy God – may your Word and your tears penetrate our numbness, drawing us into solidarity with You and all that You so deeply love. Amen.
There was once a famous theologian whose young adult son died in a mountaineering accident. After this tragedy, the theologian declared, “I shall look at the world though tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not.”2
Our text from the eight chapter of Jeremiah comes to us from a prophet and a people and their God who are looking at the world through tears. Our text is tear-stained to the point that it is not always immediately clear who exactly is speaking and who is responding. What we know is that we’re invited into a messy circle of grief where questions have no answers and hope isn’t even hinted at.
“No healing, only grief; my heart is broken,” Jeremiah begins.
In what follows – is it God speaking, is it Jeremiah speaking? Is it Jeremiah weeping or God weeping or do the prophet’s tears and God’s tears stream together in sorrow? Three times a voice calls out in grief for “my poor people.” “Listen to the weeping of my people all across the land…,” this despondent voice laments.
The South African biblical theologian Juliana Claasens describes how in this text, “God’s act of seeing the pain, of noticing the tears of the people, causes God to weep uncontrollably.”3
“Because my people are crushed and broken, I am crushed and broken, darkness and despair overwhelm me.” God says. The prophet says.
This image of God the mourner, a God who weeps, destabilizes other images of God in the book of Jeremiah, including God the architect of war. And to know God as a God who looks upon the world through tears leads us out of numbness to see and feel differently too. Because when God cries and God weeps for the hurting, God remains with us and with our world when there seems to be no other good options and no other good way out.
“Tears are a way of solidarity in pain when no other form of solidarity remain.”
Our text asks questions for which there are no good answers: Where is God in this horrific suffering? Will God no longer protect God’s people in God’s holy place?
God weeps because God is asking the painful questions too, wondering what has happened, “Why did my people anger me with their images and pointless foreign gods?”
God weeps when another person dies to the idol of the gun. God weeps when tears and grief is manipulated into a a call for vengeance and domination. When people desperate for healing and wholeness see no hope for the future, asking “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?”
We hear God weeping and wondering and searching on their behalf too, “Why then have my people not been restored to health?
To hear the haunting wails of God who weeps for God’s people is to be disturbed out of our numbness. We hear God weeping when we hear the cries of all who hurt and ache and grieve around us.
And between the heaves of our own cries, we can hear God crying too. God looks with tear-streaked eyes upon the world God made and loves so much. Because the absence of love is not hatred but apathy and indifference.
The hope of the prophet is not optimism but that the divine ache of God might penetrate our numbness. Because to ache and to grieve is to know the depth of loss and brokenness and be prepared to yearn for what God might yet do.
To weep is to resist the urge to seek retribution. To weep is to be in “solidarity in pain when no other form of solidarity remain.”
To weep is to love.
And God weeps for God’s people.
Thanks be to God.
- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd Ed. (Minneapolis, Fortress Press: 2001), 55-56. ↩︎
- Nicholas Wolsterstorff, Lament for a Son, (Grand Rapids, MI: Erdmans, 1987), 26, cited by L. Juliana M. Claasens, Mourner, Mother, Midwife: Reimagining God’s Delivering Presence in the Old Testament (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 35. ↩︎
- Claasens, 25. ↩︎