“18 O my Comforter in sorrow, my heart is faint within me.
19 Listen to the cry of my people from a land far away: “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King no longer there?”
“Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their worthless foreign idols?”
20 “The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.”
21 Since my people are crushed, I am crushed; I mourn, and horror grips me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?
1 Oh, that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears! I would weep day and night for the slain of my people. 2 Oh, that I had in the desert a lodging place for travelers, so that I might leave my people and go away from them; for they are all adulterers, a crowd of unfaithful people.
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“The opposite of love is not hate; [the opposite of love is] indifference,” said Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in 1986; “because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies… to be [at] the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that’s being dead.”
Are you dying before you’ve died? Have you become more indifferent than you would ever like to admit? No one can accuse Jeremiah of dying before he died. No one can accuse him of indifference. The man loved. When you come to see his pleading, weeping, correcting, and rebuking as tokens of love, you begin to see the indifference around us. You begin to see the indifference that is all too common within us. You begin to see, by contrast, a bit of the love of God. God certainly isn’t indifferent. The prophet, like his God, loves the people. That’s the claim of this sermon: the prophet, like his God, loves the people.
We will study this in two points. First: stuck in the middle. Second: torn in two. First, in verses 18-21 of chapter 8, stuck in the middle. Second, in verses 1-2 of chapter 9, torn in two.
First: stuck in the middle. This highly emotional passage might seem a bit bewildering and fragmented. There are questions and quotations; how does it all fit together? To grasp that, we must understand its individual parts and see how they fit together.
It’s a bit like an engine. Please pull up the first slide.
Some of us know the parts of this engine; others don’t. Some of us, like me, need this second slide to understand what’s going on with that engine.
These labels help. They help us understand what everything is and how it fits together. Think about the difference between that first picture of the engine and this diagram. This diagram helps you understand the engine better. This third slide helps you understand the Scripture of this first point better.
This is an attempt to create an equivalent to that engine for verses 18-21, which I borrowed from Lundbom.
Verses 18 and 21 are Jeremiah speaking for himself. Verse 19 a and b and verse 20 are Jeremiah speaking on behalf of the people. Verse 19c is the Lord speaking to Jeremiah. Please leave this slide up for the rest of this first point.
Now this is one of the most emotional sections in one of the most emotional books in all of Scripture. It begins with Jeremiah speaking for himself; verse 18, “My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick within me.” What you see on the screen is a bit different from what you have in your pew Bibles, but this is a translation issue going all the way back to fourth and fifth century. We are going to depart from the NIV and go with the ESV, ISV, Christian Standard Bible, and NET Bible here.
Jeremiah begins by saying that his joy is gone, that he lives in grief, and that is heart is sick within him. Why? When you wonder, “why?” you need to look around in your Bible. Look at what comes before; verse 6, ‘I have listened attentively, but they do not say what is right. None of them repent of their wickedness, saying, “What have I done?”’ Verse 8, ‘How can you say, “We are wise, for we have the law of the Lord,” when actually the lying pen of the scribes has handled it falsely?”’ Verse 11, ‘They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. “Peace, peace,” they say, when there is no peace.’ Jeremiah’s joy was gone because the people loved lies and willfully blinded themselves to the truth.
Jeremiah loved his people. He loved his nation. He wanted better for them than they wanted for themselves. He wanted them to love the Lord and follow Him with all their hearts; they didn’t and that grieved him. As JA Thompson put it, ‘Jeremiah’s unswerving loyalty to [the Lord] and his commands, coupled with deep love for his own people and his own land, tore his heart apart so that he cried out, “I am sick at heart.”’
Maybe you have something similar churning within you for this nation. You love this country. You love the people of this nation. You want better for them than they seem to want for themselves. Maybe you have something similar within you for the church in this nation.
Jeremiah was emotionally involved. That’s part of love. You can’t watch your countrymen destroy themselves and everything around them without becoming emotionally involved. You can’t watch your daughter destroy her life without being emotionally involved. Can you watch a fellow church member destroy himself without being emotionally involved? Can God? That’s a question to ask yourself when you listen to Jeremiah.
Jeremiah was anguish; he spoke for himself; he also spoke for the people to God; verse 19, ‘Listen to the cry of my people from a land far away: “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King no longer there?’ Jeremiah spoke the people’s words to God. He asked God to listen to His people—perhaps those already in exile after the first deportation to Babylon. The people wanted to know why God didn’t protect them. They wanted to know, “where was God?” “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King no longer there?” Maybe you’ve asked that question in situations of your own. It’s a question that comes out of pain.
Jeremiah brought the people’s questions to God, and here we see that he was stuck in the middle; this is where our point’s title comes from. He was stuck in the middle between the people and God because unlike, say, Job, the people didn’t bring this question to themselves. Unlike Job, they didn’t want to hear from God. They just wanted to blame God. Calvin was right to say that, “we know how hypocrites swell with vain confidence [even though] they are wholly destitute of faith and how they become… insolent whenever God threatens them.” These people who never gave a thought to following God in their day to day lives and never dreamed of any uncomfortable obedience, suddenly thought they were like Job wanting to know, “where is my God?”
God recognized the gall of sin in their question and responded with a question of His own; “Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their worthless foreign idols?” Notice that He didn’t respond to the people by saying, “you.” He responded to Jeremiah referring to the people as, “they.” This “they” language is not a good when you think about the state of the relationship between the Lord and His people; verse 19c, “Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their worthless foreign idols?”
The Lord’s question shows the utter irrelevance of the people’s earlier question. If they were so interested in God and His presence, why didn’t they ever try to meet Him before? They wanted an answer, but their question was nonsense because they never did want God. CS Lewis wrote about this in his excellent fiction Till We Have Faces, “When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” The people’s question was babble; they had no idea what they really meant because they didn’t know God.
We must know God. We must hear from God. His word is the final matter on the issue here. You see that by the structure of this section. On the slide, you can see that this is what is called a chiasm. A chiasm is a pattern often used in Hebrew poetry to emphasize the center. The first and last line are similar. The second and second to last line are similar. The center is unique and therefore most important. Here you can see that the blue lines are similar—these are the words of Jeremiah. The orange words are similar—these are the words of Jeremiah on behalf of the people. The black words in the center are unique. These are the words of the Lord. No matter how fervent our emotions like Jeremiah’s in the blue, no matter how pressing our complaints seem like the people’s in the orange, it is the words in the black—the words of God—that carry the day. Each of us would do well to remember that.
The people of Judah didn’t recognize that. They never gave a thought to returning to God. They just adopted a defeatist attitude; verse 20, “The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.”
In Israel, the wheat harvest lasted from April to June and after that came the summer fruit harvest—grapes, olives, and figs. If the wheat crop failed, there was always the summer crops. If the wheat harvest and the fruit harvest failed, the people faced a famine; “the harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.” That was a way to describe a hopeless situation. The people looked around, wondered, “where is God?” and gave up.
This attitude of hopelessness had to be particularly infuriating to Jeremiah because he had been telling the people over and over again what could be done about their situation. He heard, “the harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved,” and thought, “what, are you serious? Repent. Get a new heart. That’s how you will be saved.” The people’s defeatist attitude reminds me of a line from a TV show, “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
Jeremiah was God’s prophet to these people. This is why this point is called “stuck in the middle.” Jeremiah spoke God’s word to Judah, but Judah had no intention of listening to God. God had nothing left to say to His people that He hadn’t already said. Jeremiah was stuck in the middle. Anyone who has been in a similar situation between family members, or friendship circles, or church can tell you how maddening it is.
The people to whom the prophet was sent wouldn’t do the one and only action that would save them, and so we come to the end of the chiasm and the prophet’s response; verse 21, “Since my people are crushed, I am crushed; I mourn, and horror grips me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?”
The people wouldn’t return and so would be crushed. Since Jeremiah’s heartstrings were connected to them, he was crushed. He was looking for healing. It seems that Gilead, a mountainous region east of the Jordan River, was well known for its medicinal products. The medicine produced in Gilead could help with any number of afflictions, but it couldn’t heal the wayward soul. The medical analogy works well because we’ve come a long way since Jeremiah’s day in understanding medicine, but we are still equally impotent when it comes to changing unrepentant sinners. There is still only way to do it and it’s not in our power. Only the grace of God can heal the sin sick soul and the people in Jeremiah’s day wanted no part of that. This broke Jeremiah’s heart. That’s part of love. That’s part of the prophetic office. That’s part of being a pastor. That’s part of being an elder. That’s part of being a Cadet counselor or GEMS counselor or youth leader. That’s part of being a church member. That’s certainly part of becoming more like Jesus. “The opposite of love is not hate; [the opposite of love is] indifference.”
Love isn’t easy. This passage is clear that such loe split Jeremiah in two. That’s our second point: torn in two. Here in our fourth slide, if you could bring it up, is probably the most famous painting of Jeremiah.
This is Michelangelo’s Jeremiah; it’s in the Sistine Chapel. This painting is pretty similar to most paintings of Jeremiah; the man is in anguish and that is almost always how he is pictured. This passage is one reason why; verse 1, “Oh, that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears! I would weep day and night for the slain of my people.”
Jeremiah ran out of tears before he ran out of sorrow. Maybe you’ve had a good, long cry recently. There was doubtlessly a point when you stopped crying. Maybe you felt a bit better because you had that good cry. Nothing had really changed in the outward situation, but your inward situation has changed as a result of that cry. Jeremiah didn’t experience that release when he cried about what was going on in his country. He never cried himself better. He ran out first.
I imagine that some of us have had that experience. You could walk up to Jeremiah and say, “I know exactly what you are talking about,” and then proceed to tell him about your son who wants nothing to do with God even though his life is falling apart. Jesus knows what that’s like too. When he drew near Jerusalem and saw it, ‘he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
Jesus understands the sorrow of loving people in unrepentant sin, but it isn’t just that he understands what you and Jeremiah are going through; it’s more that you and Jeremiah understand what he’s going through. Nobody weeps over unrepentant sinners like God, and nobody rejoices over repentant sinners like God. It’s true that, “there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” It’s also true that, “there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents,” than there is rejoicing on earth, and there is often great rejoicing on earth when a sinner repents.
This show of emotion might make some of us uncomfortable. The idea of someone weeping day and night for the spiritual state of others might strike some of us as a bit over the top. Would there be a place for that in this sanctuary? Would there be a place for that among us? These are important questions. It’s important to consider how we might respond to the prophets if God sent people like these among us. Sometimes they weep. Sometimes they lose their cool. Sometimes they use animal dung as sermon illustrations. Sometimes they talk a lot about their personal lives. Sometimes they have it out with God even as they do what He tells them to do. Sometimes their habits are eccentric. Sometimes they hang out with the wrong crowd while actually doing something good for the wrong crowd. That’s Jeremiah, then Amos, then Ezekiel, then Hosea, then Jonah, then John the Baptist, and then Jesus. How would we receive them?
In his situation, Jeremiah wept. He wept because these were his people and he couldn’t help but identify with them; verse 1, “I would weep day and night for the slain of my people.” Jeremiah didn’t distance himself from them even though they were distancing themselves from God. J. Andrew Dearman gets this verse right saying, “those who would offer a grave spiritual diagnosis must love the patients and not stand aloof from them.” This is why the best preaching is about putting all of us before God rather than pointing the finger at us.
Jeremiah knew these were his people, and in the next moment, he never wanted to see them again; verse 2, “Oh, that I had in the desert a lodging place for travelers, so that I might leave my people and go away from them; for they are all adulterers, a crowd of unfaithful people.”
When comparing verse 1 with 2 we see the tension that’s part of loving people in unrepentant sin. You want to move toward them and away from them at the same time. You want what’s good for them, but they refuses to want what’s good for them. Loving someone like that will tear you in two. You weep for love of them, and you want space from them. You want both in the same moment.
Only Jesus gets this perfectly right, which is good because it’s really only his identification with any of us that ultimately matters. It is also only he who knows when exactly to finally separate himself from those who won’t repent. He knows this tension better than Jeremiah. He knows it better than us. We will distance at the wrong time. We will distance for the wrong reasons. We will identify ourselves with those we love unhelpfully. Only Jesus gets this right every time. We will never do it near as well as him; neither did Jeremiah, but that’s no reason not to try. Refusing to try would be indifference. That would be the opposite of love. Amen.