Jeremiah 34:16a – A Disciplined Expectancy

16 Thus says the Lord:

“Refrain your voice from weeping,
And your eyes from tears." Jeremiah 34:16a, New King James Version

I tend to latch on to doomed shows. I've settled into the fact that I like what not everyone does and that I retain a fondness for what others choose to forget.

An example is the one-season run of Matthew Perry's Go On. He plays sports talk radio host who rounds out being quick with the quip with the reality that he is healing from his wife's untimely death. In the process, he finds himself eating incessantly.

He complains to one of the people in a grief support group that he hadn't been able to exercise the discipline he would've expected, perhaps trying to summon from himself that which he calls for from the athletes he covers. An older, wiser sufferer sees beyond the will and the moment. "Maybe you aren't ready to stop yet."

I seized that patient perspective because there is a lot of truth in it. Grief and healing, by the grace of God, often take time. We placate or medicate ourselves with lesser things, and then, by that persistent grace, we outgrow them. Our souls, to pick up on the group member's food metaphor, eventually leave behind the milk and crave the meat of what life has to teach.

Even there, though, as Paul puts it in inspired Scripture, there is more action, more discipline than I would allow for in my fondness for using wise sayings, including Scripture, to excuse my doing nothing.

Many times, I'm sure I've said with all the patient gravity of the Wisdom Moment in the sitcom dialogue, "I'm not ready." It conveys, "I don't feel like it," but with enough respectability to allow me to escape the moment of decision unscathed.

That's what I like about the whole counsel of the Word of God, especially as expressed in the opening of Jeremiah 34:16. For all my penchant for finding an escape hatch before I get to summoning self-discipline, a gift of the Holy Spirit, or come to embrace responsibility, there is God's command. He tells the grieving whose cries He has shown His tenderness to hear, He tells them to stop. Control your thoughts. Control your mouths. Control your tears.

I'm sure I have used such spartan shortcuts for my own convenience and self-indulgence. Other people's sobs make me uncomfortable. They might be prompting me to do something, or at least, scripturally, to weep with those who weep, and I don't generally like that. MY tears God keeps in a bottle, I can quote with spiritual sanctimony. Others just need to dry up. Pay the counselor on the way out.

God is intimately Present enough, though, to deliver essentially that message with an entirely different heart. The weeping are heard. Jeremiah 34:15 says so, and it's remarkable. The nation is rallying, dancing. Even the priestly class is exuberant.

God hears that, notes it, points to it as a reflection of His goodness and glory. Yet, He still lingers over the hurting on the margins who aren't joining into the party that's good enough for everyone else.

Establishing that fount of Fatherly patience in His character, He can, and does, say enough. He is the One, after all, Who said through Scripture in Ecclesiastes that there is a time to weep, and a time not to. Jeremiah 34:16 is, apparently, the beginning of the time not to. The discipline He summons, He makes possible. Stephen King, of all people, might provide some paint from The Green Mile in our quest to visualize theology aright. He says of one of his characters, "The father wiped his son's tears automatically, as a man does who has had lots of practice."

God dries tears in bids them stop because He knows hearts expertly. He knows, adult or child, grief can swallow us up, become its own lifestyle, addiction, idol. It can obscure His impending glory. Consuming, habitual grief can occlude tomorrow, and God Whose mercy He pledges are new every morning won't have it perpetually enslaving His own. "Sincere pessimism," adjudicates Chesterton with clarity in Orthodoxy, "is the unpardonable sin."

God dictates when we are ready to stop grieving the past. Summoning the discipline to have that dictate determine our thoughts and our expressions of them takes faith. Such resilience takes an abiding belief, as Cervantes put it in Don Quixote, "God Who gives the wound gives the salve." Better is coming, and we greet it with faith and discipline. God, the Becoming One will be as evident tomorrow as He was in the gauzy yesterday for which we long. We summon our affections and expressions to that biblical certainty.