In the light of what we have learned about the cruel
abuse heaped on young Daniel in Coventry, and thinking of my grandson Isaac
baptised here three weeks ago who by contrast is so much loved and cherished,
it’s tempting to speak about childhood and how we love and don’t love children.
But that must wait for another day. I need to stay with this Jeremiah. There is a
link, I suppose: Jeremiah, called to the impossible task of being a prophet, pleads
he is ‘only a child’: how can he find the words or have the courage to utter
them when there is no hope that they will be heard or understood?
‘The harvest is past,
the summer is ended, and we are not saved’. Apt words for the weekend of the
autumn equinox. I have always found them haunting. The summer has been
glorious, but its long golden days are becoming a memory. The Lindisfarne
Gospels will soon leave us again for their southern exile, not to return home
for many years. The flowers that glowed in our marvellous festival are dead.
Summer has too short a lease: its light is being overtaken, and soon we shall
be lighting fires in cold dark places. Jeremiah’s autumnal farewell to good
times captures the mood of fall. And maybe his elegiac outpourings of two and
half millennia ago can speak to us who also find it hard to take our leave of light-filled
health or happiness or hope.
This
is one of the so-called ‘confessions’ of Jeremiah, in which this most
passionate of prophets exposes something of the agony and self-doubt going on
inside. This was a young man who had never sought to be a prophet, never wanted
to speak out as prophets must, never contemplated the pain and misery it would
bring him. ‘My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.’ In another place he cries out like Job,
‘Cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it
not be blessed! Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and
spend my days in shame?’ And out pour the relentless questions: five of them in
this short reading. ‘Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her? Is there
no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why has the health of my poor
people not been restored?’
What
strikes us about these cries of pain is their honesty. They don’t pretend.
Jeremiah is telling the truth about his condition: that it is unbearably hard
to be hurt, misunderstood, in pain, in despair and above all, without a friend.
And like others in the Hebrew Bible, he is not afraid to acknowledge the
reality of dark times. Many of the psalms are in the same minor key: there are
more laments in the Psalter than any other kind of psalm. It is a courageous
thing to do, to turn suffering back to God and argue with him. It’s what we
find at the cross when Jesus cries in the words of one of the most desolate psalm
laments: Lema, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
All of life has a dark side, a night
that overtakes the day, a winter that dispels summer. Sometimes we expect it,
often it takes us by surprise. True religion recognises that faith is not a
pain-killing escape from that shadow but a way of facing it truthfully. Faith
helps us stope pretending. The job of the church is not to sell comfort but
courage. Life is hard. We need the virtue of fortitude. Faith points us in the
right direction.
But
his confessions are not just his own personal outpourings. They belong to an
entire people. At the end of the 6th century, an ominous cloud hung
over Judah, the threat of being overrun by Babylon their overlord amassing
soldiers and weapons on their borders. Those with eyes to see understood that
the life they knew was at an end, ruin was imminent and those who survived would
be deported to a strange land where it was not obvious whether they could ever
again sing the Lord’s song. Jeremiah never wavered in looking this prospect in
the eyes, and speaking about it as God’s work, though it cost him dear. Neither
did he walk away when he had spoken such hard words but stood with his people,
imploring God’s mercy, yet knowing that he and they would not escape judgment.
As a victim himself, his destiny embodied theirs. He talked of being a lamb led
to the slaughter - precisely how he also saw Judah. To make other people’s
sufferings and fears your own is the mark of true ministry, compassion. It is the image of Jesus who
emptied himself so as to take the form of a slave and share our human
condition. It is how God is, who, says the passion story, always stands with us
in our darkness and our pain.
Sunt lachrimae rerum: ‘there are tears in
things’ says Virgil in a beautiful but untranslatable line. This lament ends
that way. ‘O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of
tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!’ It
sounds like a cry of despair. Yet the strange thing is that lament opens the
way to a new perspective. It purifies the gaze, helps us see differently. The
desert fathers spoke of the ‘gift of tears’ as a kind of baptism, meaning not
just what we call self-awareness, emotional intelligence, but a cleansing of
the soul. To be at the lowest point of lament, where we have nothing else to
rely on or trust in, things become clearer, and faith senses that in ways we
can’t understand, God himself could be in the midst of our ordeal, a crucified
God who knows pain and darkness, a God who, says our psalm, though he has his
dwelling on high, yet humbles himself to behold things that are on earth; who
not only sees but acts by taking the lowly out of the dust and lifting the poor
out of the mire.
Psalm
laments usually end on a note of confidence, even thankfulness. There is a
turning-round, a belief that we are heard. Sometimes it is feeble and
tentative, barely glimpsed before it is snuffed out again, as in other laments
of Jeremiah. Sometimes, it transfigures
despair as in the miserere psalm
Jesus quotes on the cross where faith wins through to a radiant sunburst. But
when we find ourselves shedding tears for the tragedy of Syria, or the victims
of Nairobi, or little Daniel and so many children abused in literal or
metaphorical coal holes, or for the friend we love who has a terminal illness,
or for ourselves in the fear or pain or shame that haunt us, we are in a place
where prayer becomes possible. And when we are overwhelmed, and can’t find it
in ourselves to pray, we can at least weep for others and for our broken selves. We can hold out empty hands as we do in this
eucharist, to receive what mercy and love want to give. This is not a happy
ending, but the hard exacting journey through the vale of soul-making that
lasts a lifetime. Not a happy ending, but the most important journey there
is. Is there any other path we would want to walk but this?
Durham Cathedral, 22 September 2013
Jeremiah 8.18-9.1, Psalm 113
