Scripture Daily

Context No. 1178 of 4322 · Jeremiah

Context · Reflection

Jeremiah 9:17-21: in context

17The LORD of Armies says, “Consider, and call for the mourning women, that they may come. Send for the skillful women, that they may come. 18Let them make haste and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears and our eyelids gush out with waters. 19For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion, ‘How we are ruined! We are greatly confounded because we have forsaken the land, because they have cast down our dwellings.’” 20Yet hear the LORD’s word, you women. Let your ear receive the word of his mouth. Teach your daughters wailing. Everyone teach her neighbor a lamentation. 21For death has come up into our windows. It has entered into our palaces to cut off the children from outside, and the young men from the streets.

God tells Jeremiah to summon the professional mourning women, the skilled wailers, to come quickly and raise a lament, so that the people's eyes run down with tears. A voice of wailing rises from Zion: how we are ruined. And then a striking command: teach your daughters wailing, and each woman teach her neighbor a lament, for death has climbed in through the windows and entered the palaces, cutting off the children in the streets and the young men in the squares.

What is striking is that God calls for grief to be taught. Teach your daughters to wail; teach one another to lament. In the face of catastrophe, God does not tell the people to buck up or move on quickly; he summons the skilled mourners and commands that lamentation be passed down, learned, practiced. There is a wisdom in that our efficient culture has largely lost, the recognition that grief is something we may need to be taught to do, that lament is a skill and a discipline, not merely a spontaneous overflow. When death has climbed in the windows and the young are cut off, the fitting response is not to hurry past the pain but to enter it fully, to weep, and even to help each other learn how. Scripture takes lament seriously; a whole book is named for it, and the psalms are full of it. God is not embarrassed by tears, and here he practically prescribes them, calling for the experts in grief and commanding that the art of mourning be handed on. There is a season, this passage insists, when the right and holy thing is to weep, and to teach one another how.

When real loss comes, do I rush past the grief, or can I let myself enter it fully, even learning and teaching the discipline of lament that God himself here calls for?

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