Jeremiah 31:15 – Time-Release Grace

15 Thus says the Lord:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
Lamentation and bitter weeping,
Rachel weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted for her children,
Because they are no more.” Jeremiah 31:15, New King James Version

Toula Portokalos is finding her way in the world. Or, rather, as CS Lewis in Screwtape Letters describes the pervasive phenomenon, it is finding its place in her. The central character in Big Fat Greek Wedding is being assigned a useful spinsterhood as she has reached A Certain Age without a family. She can, then, the well-meaning extended family members reason, serve out her usefulness and find some validation within the family's interconnected web of businesses.

She chafes glumly, unwilling to accommodate to the assumptions around her, to settle into a part in a process for the remainder of her days. The family patriarch is mystified. Isn't she grateful for everything her forbearers have built, for a chance to fit into what already is? Her mother, who later explains that the Greek man is the head but that the woman turns the head, understands more deeply and says so. She grips her daughter tightly, issuing at once a purr and a roar on behalf of her daughter's fading hopes for a future that is really Toula's. "I… know… what… you… WANT."

This seems to be the Father's sentiment also in Jeremiah 31:15. Amid the all-set, amid the culture-wide celebration of stability after the exile which sweeps in the young and the old, the priest and the layman, there is much for which to be grateful. They are back in the land. They are provided for, every harvest enjoyed under their own vine evidence of God's particular grace which is especially resonant since they have known what it is to serve foreigners in a strange land.

Yet God Who dictates Jeremiah 31:15 hears the dissonant reluctance on the margins and speaks to it. He connects with the unsatisfied longings, aware that people to whom He gave dominion in Genesis need more than place and provision in the present. In spite of the fall, in spite of evident participation in its rebellion in our own generation and in our own lives, we are not wired to be wards, resigned to be receptacles in our days on Earth. We want to matter. We want to leave a legacy that, by God's prevailing grace, is ours.

God knows, after all, and insists, that He placed eternity within the hearts of men. As Fatherly as is His provision of daily bread, as validated as is His character when His people of every generation respond with communal gratitude, He made us for more than getting and spending. As we experience His grace in her own succession of moments, we begin to trust it, insist on it, long for it to outlast simply providing for us.

We could be shushed or squashed as ungrateful. Don't we know how richly we deserved sin's consequences, the equivalent of the exile? Don't we know how integral a part we have played in our own estrangement, sabotaging the very family and cultural relationships from which we now claim we pine for integration? Yet God is not coldly condescending.

Even when what could be filed as the petulant protests of Jeremiah 31:15 turn to what could be classified as pretensions of pride, He still hears. What is man, to impress upon the forbearance of the Son of God Who left Heaven and became poor for our sakes, to talk about what a disciple gives up in the Son's service? When Peter does, though, when he catalogs that he and his fellow disciples have left families to follow Christ, Christ promises deeper and wider familial bonds in Him. It is in His everlasting character to place the lonely in families.

Are we too defined by the stasis of the present? If something in us resists this restriction, does the enemy of our souls compound that discomfort within with guilt, distracting that we might not seek out its true Source? Christ places us here, and purposefully leaves us here after staking His eternal claim to those for whom He died, to make disciples, to gain eternal rewards which moths, and thieves, and rust, and the false contentment which conformity crushes upon us, cannot steal. Stand out. Insist on the working out of future grace which faith points toward as just as assured as present provision.