By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
Thursday
Bearing the burden of caring
Jeremiah 8: 18 - 9: 11
This is our fourth and final glimpse at the writings of Jeremiah. In the first three passages, and the five passages from Ezekiel, we came upon some penetrating revelations of the relationship between God and human sin and sorrow. There is no suggestion in the Bible that Ezekiel and Jeremiah ever met each other, but it is surely clear that they were both met by the same God. They had the same trouble with false prophets which offered slight healing to the nation. While seeing national disaster as the consequence of unjust economic and social practices, they came to understand the heart of God's purpose to be the salvation of the people, not simply the matching of crimes and punishments. They both came to a high doctrine of the prophetic call. To accept such a call was to get under the burden of the nation's waywardness. The speaker for God no longer stood aloof, simply warning the wicked of the disastrous consequences of wickedness, but bore the burden of that wickedness.
Uniquely in Jeremiah 's case, we have come upon revelations of the nature of the relationship between God and the individual prophet. If so much hangs on your message-bearing, how can you be up to such a burden? If so much hangs on your message-bearing, how can you pass up that burden? Since the message is so open to misrepresentation, how do you cope with the agony of self-doubt? If the nation is that hard of hearing, how long can you wait for results? Throughout the book we keep coming upon eloquent testimony as to what it is like to be God's person.
I selected today's verses because I think they make the most tender witness to what happens to the human heart when it gets close to God. Read through the verses until you get a sense of the movement.
"My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me." From all
over the land false assurances are heard: As long as the king is safe in Jerusalem the Lord will reign in Zion. As long as the fertility rites are observed, the harvest will be plentiful. All the time falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land. A brother cannot trust his brother and a neighbour cannot trust her neighbour. The people heap oppression upon oppression and deceit upon deceit and they refuse to know God.
- Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts:
- "Behold, I will refine them and test them, for what else can I do, because of my people?
Their tongue is a deadly arrow; it speaks deceitfully;
with his mouth each speaks peaceably to his neighbour,
but in his heart he plans an ambush for him." - What is it like to be the bearer of those words to a rebellious house?
Do the following words sound as if they are coming from one who has come to know God?
For the wound of the daughter of my people is my heart wounded,
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold on me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?- Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored?
O that my head were waters,
and my eyes a fountain of tears, - that I might weep day and night
- for the slain of the daughter of my people!
Petition
Father and Mother of all,- Hear our deep cries. Hear our anger.
- With tears of rage we lift up before you
- the sick with killing diseases, for whom there appears to be no relief or cure;
- the victims, whose bodies were violated so early in their formation that their wounds seem beyond the reach of healing powers;
- the lives, doomed from the heginning by the hostile fate to which they were born.
Dear God, we are talking about real people we know and love.- And through them we begin to sense the countless numbers in like circumstances throughout the world.
- We lift them all up before you. Hear their cries.
- If we didn't bring them before you, we'd have to harden our hearts against them.
If we didn't rage on their behalf, we'd have to stop caring. - Dear God, in your mercy hear us, whether our praying is proper or not. And let not the sun go down on our wrath.
Amen