Jeremiah 9:17-21 – A Trained Grief
17 Thus says the Lord of hosts:
“Consider and call for the mourning women,
That they may come;
And send for skillful wailing women,
That they may come.
18
Let them make haste
And take up a wailing for us,
That our eyes may run with tears,
And our eyelids gush with water.
19
For a voice of wailing is heard from Zion:
‘How we are plundered!
We are greatly ashamed,
Because we have forsaken the land,
Because we have been cast out of our dwellings.’ ”
20
Yet hear the word of the Lord, O women,
And let your ear receive the word of His mouth;
Teach your daughters wailing,
And everyone her neighbor a lamentation.
21
For death has come through our windows,
Has entered our palaces,
To kill off the children—no longer to be outside!
And the young men—no longer on the streets!
Pat Conroy's narrator in Beach Music reflects that between his heritage and his former wife's that his daughter, "would get more than her portion of the genes of grief. Together, our families contained enough sad stories to jump-start a colony of lemmings toward the nearest body of water."
From this lot in common with the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, and more intensified in some strains, Jeremiah 9 shows that heredity and environment compound and direct the grief we passed on to the next generation. Having proclaimed the nation's fate, God tells the prophet in Jeremiah 9:17 to consider and call for the mourning women. That's their title. That's their type. As Jeremiah feared for himself earlier in the chapter, tears have taken them over. When their children consider their mothers, these memories will be draped in black.
If the children miss the lesson of grief by association and example, the Lord's directed sarcasm ensures that they will carry on the burdened life of their parents. Go ahead, He says in Jeremiah 9:20, teach your daughters wailing. That's the gospel they get from you, complete, engulfing grief. Use the neural intensity of those emotions and the unmistakable weight of life's teachable moments to instruct in hopelessness.
There's a divine deftness in that the Lord uses Jeremiah to uphold paralyzing grief for examination. This is the guy rightly titled the weeping prophet. He knows something of the weight of sin. He hates that the burden of the parents' resistance will be passed on to the children. This very legacy of depravity provokes him to cry out to the Lord, but that's the point and the difference.
Jeremiah presages Christ as a Man ACQUAINTED with grief. It may put him on his face as he realizes the gulf between God's holiness and the depravity of his nation and himself, but his response is telling, and Christ-like. He cries out to the Father. He actively intercedes. Every revelation either of the Father's glory or of the people's distance from it provokes prayer as the very opposite of performed paralysis. Like the parents pantomiming grief so the little ones catch on, Jeremiah, and more so Christ, also paint a compelling lesson with sorrow's darker hues. Pray. They carry forward David's colors in conviction. Perhaps the Lord will be merciful.
What was tinted with speculation for Jeremiah, or for David, ought to radiate unmistakably for the New Testament believer. For us, indeed, there is a time to grieve at a time not to. There is a time to be honest with those who come behind us that the cost of Adam's sin, that the cost of OUR sin on the culture and the family is high. But WE get to turn the page. We don't grieve as those who have no hope, who had nothing more compelling and exacting to teach that how to indulge self-pity professionally.
We pick ourselves up as Joshua was commanded to do. We fight to enter Christ's rest, as Hebrews commands, with at least as much of a martial, disciplined spirit as Joshua knew as commander of Israel's armies. We give off, then, the gravitas of leaders who know the cost of sin, but who know the way of confession is to get up and fight again by the grace of God. Ours is an approachable, vulnerable, but multidimensional, resilient testimony. Draw near, and you will hear victory's strains, even if in the distance at the moment.
“Consider and call for the mourning women,
That they may come;
And send for skillful wailing women,
That they may come.
18
Let them make haste
And take up a wailing for us,
That our eyes may run with tears,
And our eyelids gush with water.
19
For a voice of wailing is heard from Zion:
‘How we are plundered!
We are greatly ashamed,
Because we have forsaken the land,
Because we have been cast out of our dwellings.’ ”
20
Yet hear the word of the Lord, O women,
And let your ear receive the word of His mouth;
Teach your daughters wailing,
And everyone her neighbor a lamentation.
21
For death has come through our windows,
Has entered our palaces,
To kill off the children—no longer to be outside!
And the young men—no longer on the streets!
Pat Conroy's narrator in Beach Music reflects that between his heritage and his former wife's that his daughter, "would get more than her portion of the genes of grief. Together, our families contained enough sad stories to jump-start a colony of lemmings toward the nearest body of water."
From this lot in common with the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, and more intensified in some strains, Jeremiah 9 shows that heredity and environment compound and direct the grief we passed on to the next generation. Having proclaimed the nation's fate, God tells the prophet in Jeremiah 9:17 to consider and call for the mourning women. That's their title. That's their type. As Jeremiah feared for himself earlier in the chapter, tears have taken them over. When their children consider their mothers, these memories will be draped in black.
If the children miss the lesson of grief by association and example, the Lord's directed sarcasm ensures that they will carry on the burdened life of their parents. Go ahead, He says in Jeremiah 9:20, teach your daughters wailing. That's the gospel they get from you, complete, engulfing grief. Use the neural intensity of those emotions and the unmistakable weight of life's teachable moments to instruct in hopelessness.
There's a divine deftness in that the Lord uses Jeremiah to uphold paralyzing grief for examination. This is the guy rightly titled the weeping prophet. He knows something of the weight of sin. He hates that the burden of the parents' resistance will be passed on to the children. This very legacy of depravity provokes him to cry out to the Lord, but that's the point and the difference.
Jeremiah presages Christ as a Man ACQUAINTED with grief. It may put him on his face as he realizes the gulf between God's holiness and the depravity of his nation and himself, but his response is telling, and Christ-like. He cries out to the Father. He actively intercedes. Every revelation either of the Father's glory or of the people's distance from it provokes prayer as the very opposite of performed paralysis. Like the parents pantomiming grief so the little ones catch on, Jeremiah, and more so Christ, also paint a compelling lesson with sorrow's darker hues. Pray. They carry forward David's colors in conviction. Perhaps the Lord will be merciful.
What was tinted with speculation for Jeremiah, or for David, ought to radiate unmistakably for the New Testament believer. For us, indeed, there is a time to grieve at a time not to. There is a time to be honest with those who come behind us that the cost of Adam's sin, that the cost of OUR sin on the culture and the family is high. But WE get to turn the page. We don't grieve as those who have no hope, who had nothing more compelling and exacting to teach that how to indulge self-pity professionally.
We pick ourselves up as Joshua was commanded to do. We fight to enter Christ's rest, as Hebrews commands, with at least as much of a martial, disciplined spirit as Joshua knew as commander of Israel's armies. We give off, then, the gravitas of leaders who know the cost of sin, but who know the way of confession is to get up and fight again by the grace of God. Ours is an approachable, vulnerable, but multidimensional, resilient testimony. Draw near, and you will hear victory's strains, even if in the distance at the moment.
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