EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
(כ) Lamentations 2:11. So exasperating is his misery that he feels as if organic parts of his body were dismembered. My eyes fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the ground—an effect of terrible grief, showing how body and soul are sympathetic with each other over the breach of the daughter of my people. This shattered condition was replete with the harrowing details of suffering, as when the young children and the sucklings faint in the streets of the city.
(ל) Lamentations 2:12. His ears heard their piteous cravings, while to their mothers they are saying, Where is corn and wine, solid and liquid nourishment. Even when listening, his eyes saw the older children faint as the wounded in the streets of the city, and infants in arms poured their souls into their mother’s bosom, which could supply no aliment.
HOMILETICS
THE UTTER EXHAUSTION OF GRIEF
I. Because of the hopelessness of the desolation endured. “For the destruction of the daughter of my people” (Lamentations 2:11). The desolation is complete. Everything is destroyed—Temple, home, army, nation, wealth, food, and the very capacity to rouse themselves from the torpor of despair. When the light of hope is quenched it is impossible to put forth effort. Paralysis is destruction.
II. Because of the heart-rending spectacle of little children fainting in the streets and dying in their mothers’ arms, while they vainly moan for food. “Because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets. They say to their mothers, ‘Where is corn and wine?’ when their soul was poured out into their mother’s bosom” (Lamentations 2:11-12). The harrowing details here given are the most affecting that have yet been depicted by the graphic and versatile pen of the prophet. The cry—an oft-repeated cry, as the tense means—of the children for food, which the mothers were powerless to supply, only added to the tortures they already suffered. So completely prostrate were they with their misery, that they saw their children die with indifference, and could not conceal an unnatural relief when they heard their last sob. Excessive grief blunts the edge of the finest natural instincts.
III. Because all the powers for expressing emotion are completely spent. “Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth” (Lamentations 2:11). Jeremiah employs the terms in ordinary use, and as they were popularly understood. As the heart was regarded by the Jews as the seat of the intellect, so the liver, as the chief of the large viscera classed together under the name of bowels, was supposed to be the seat of the emotions. By the pouring out, therefore, of the liver upon the ground was meant that his feelings had entirely given way under the acuteness of his sorrow, and he could no longer restrain them.—Speaker’s Comm. The agony of grief was passed. It was quelled by sheer exhaustion. He wept till he could weep no more. He grieved till he was incapable of feeling his grief. A tearless sorrow is the most dangerous, and the most difficult to cure.
LESSONS.—
1. There is a limit to the greatest human sorrow.
2. There is a moment in the experience of the sufferer when death itself is welcome.
3. The greatest sorrow is a painful testimony to the desolating power of sin.
ILLUSTRATIONS.—Grief prostrating. Late in the afternoon of a summer day I entered a quiet graveyard where slept one of my dearest friends. It occupied the brow of a hill, which, with many a knoll and graceful undulation, sloped to the green meadow, watered by a winding stream, now catching, at its repeated curves, the rays of the setting sun. On the left was a pleasant wood, where the sturdy pine and fruit-bearing beech concealed narrow paths to cool caves and mossy banks. White birches and the trembling aspen, with the sweet-scented willow, grew upon the right, and from beyond rose the curling smoke from the cottage-houses. A robin sang its song of love and praise, a sparrow passed me bearing food to its little progeny, and the chirp of the merry grasshopper mingled with the hum of hundreds of flitting insects. But for this peace-breathing scene I had no greeting. The wild storm, thunder, rain, and darkness had been more welcome. Yielding utterly to my grief, I threw myself upon the sod, and took no heed of time. There came over me a sense of utter and hopeless desolation; an agony like that of death turned to bitterness the blessings of my lot.
—Grief is a flower as delicate and prompt to fade as happiness. Still it does not wholly die. Like the magic rose, dried and unrecognisable, a warm air breathed on it will suffice to renew its bloom.—De Gasparin.
Misery makes indelible impressions. The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories is in a direct ratio to the squares of their importance. Their apparent age runs up miraculously, like the value of diamonds, as they increase in magnitude. A great calamity, for instance, is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. It stains backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of life before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we are turning. Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston slides backwards and forwards as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out of a ring. The engine lays one of its fingers calmly but firmly upon a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and tell a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over with twenty centuries. So it is that a great silent-movingsilent-moving an hour or a moment—as sharp an impression as if it had taken half a lifetime to engrave it.—Holmes.
Distress exhausting. Distress is trouble of a mental kind, tending to despair. Tribulation may be described as the “fighting without,” whilst distress may be described as the “fears within.” That kind of trouble is indicated which comes upon a wrestler when his antagonist has succeeded in throwing him after a long struggle, has got his foot on him, is holding him down, and all seems to be up with him. Before, when wrestling, he was troubled, now he is distressed. Thus we see that the afflictions contemplated by the terms tribulation and distress are no light ones; and it is little wonder that, under the strain of such untoward circumstances of outward and inward trouble, the Christian should lose heart and fear the worst.
Grief excessively indulged. Ebenezer Adams, an eminent member of the Society of Friends, on visiting a lady of rank, whom he found, six months after the death of her husband, seated on a sofa covered with black cloth and in all the dignity of woe, approached her with great solemnity, and gently taking her by the hand, thus addressed her: “So, friend, I see, then, thou hast not yet forgiven God Almighty.” This reproof had so great an effect on the lady, that she immediately laid aside her violent grief, and again entered on the discharge of the duties of life.
The cure of excessive sorrow. A pale mourner stood bending over the tomb, and his tears fell fast and often. As he raised his humid eyes to heaven, he cried, “My brother! O my brother.” A sage passed that way and said, “For whom dost thou mourn?” “One,” replied he, “whom I did not sufficiently love while living, but whose inestimable worth I now feel.” “What wouldst thou do if he were restored to thee?” The mourner replied that he would never offend him by an unkind word, but would take every occasion to show his friendship, if he could but come back to his fond embrace. “Then, waste not thy time in useless grief,” said the sage; “but if thou hast friends, go and cherish the living, remembering that they will one day be dead also.”
—Like the passengers through the tunnelled Alps from the dark, cold, stifling air, emerging on the broad light-flooded plains of Lombardy, it is often by a way which they know not, gloomy and underground, that the convoy is carried which God’s Spirit is bringing to the wealthy place; and your present grief you will have no reason to regret if it introduce you to God’s friendship and to joys which do not perish in the using. Affliction is God’s message.—Hamilton.