From Darkness To Light, From Sorrow To Hope: Lessons From Jeremiah And LamentationsSample

"Fourth Sunday of Advent: Rachel, Dry Your Tears"

There is a dark side to the Christmas story. My son discovered it when he was only three years old and his mother read him a paraphrase of the Christmas story from Madeleine L’Engle’s book The Glorious Impossible.2 The book is beautifully illustrated with full-color reproductions of Giotto’s paintings of the life of Christ from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. As they read, my wife and my little boy came to a painting entitled “The Massacre of the Innocents.” In it Giotto depicts King Herod’s soldiers searching for the baby Jesus and putting the infants of Judea to the sword. The results of their grisly labors lie underfoot, a naked jumble at the bottom of the page. “What are those from, Mommy?” asked my son. 

What is a mother to say? Told in all its gruesome detail, the Christmas story is hardly suitable for children. This is the dark side of Christmas, the raw wound of the Nativity. Army boots tromp and stamp across the manger scene. Though the Christ child was born and rescued, the babes of Bethlehem were slaughtered and buried. Sometimes the difficulty with Jeremiah is finding the grace, but here the difficulty is keeping it all in. Since Rachel’s grief was great, her comfort must be even greater, so Jeremiah 31 contains all kinds of comfort: reward, return, restoration. When God told Rachel to dry her tears, he was not just saying, “There, there, it’s all right.” He was promising to make things all right. 

The comfort God offers is real comfort, and the joy he promises is real joy. Weeping will last only for the night; then morning comes, full of song. Sometimes it is difficult to believe such promises, especially when life is hard and our sufferings seem great. There may even be times when we, like Rachel, refuse to be comforted. But God promises that the believer’s sufferings will not last forever: “I will turn their mourning into gladness; I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow” (31:13b). These promises must be received the way Jeremiah received them—by faith. Few of God’s promises were realities for Jeremiah. They were only promises. Most likely, what Jeremiah saw when he looked around was that he was still in prison and that Jerusalem was still in shambles. Yet his vision of comfort and joy gave him the strength to keep on living for the Lord, even while he suffered. It should be the same for us. We see great suffering in the world. We suffer ourselves. There may even be times when we refuse to be comforted. But God has comfort for us. The day will come when everything will be made right with the world, when suffering will come to an end, and even Rachel will dry her tears.