Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
14^th of September, 2025

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28

Have any of you read Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series? If not, I highly recommend them. The books follow Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, and Ibrahim, who live in a luxury retirement community and use their long life experience to solve mysteries. The latest book, The Last Devil to Die, is the saddest – spoiler alert – because in it Stephen, the husband of Elizabeth, dies after living with worsening dementia through the previous three books. Stephen is such a lovely character, and Elizabeth is shown as loving him so much that I got a wee bit weepy at his death, despite him being imaginary.

Richard Osman gives us a moment when Elizabeth is on her way to Stephen’s funeral that describes one of the common experiences of grief:

Elizabeth looked out of the window of the car at one point, and saw a mother pick up a soft toy her child had dropped out of its pram. Elizabeth almost burst into laughter, that life was daring to continue. Didn’t they know? Hadn’t they heard? Everything has changed, everything. And yet nothing has changed. Nothing. The day carries on as it would. An old man at a traffic light takes off his hat as the hearse passes, but, other than that, the high street is the same. How can these two realities possibly coexist?[1]

In today’s reading from Jeremiah, we find a similar feeling in the face of loss. Didn’t they know? Hadn’t they heard? Jeremiah is not talking about the death of an individual, but the death of an entire community; Judah has lost its independence, Jerusalem is in ruins, and the Temple is gone. Jeremiah describes not only a devastated land, but an entire creation undone:

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.

The only other place in the Bible in which the term ‘waste and void,’ tohu wa-bohu, is used is in the creation story at the beginning of the Book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void,’ tohu wa-bohu. Now the earth is becoming that formless void again. On the first day of creation, ‘God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good,’ but now the heavens have no light. The land is no longer fruitful; it is not even stable; there are no people on the earth and no birds in the heavens – everything has been destroyed by the Lord’s fierce anger.

Of course, none of that has happened. Despite the severity of Judah’s sufferings, there are still people, the earth remains stable, and the sun, moon, and stars still light the sky. But this is what their suffering feels like. In the same way that Elizabeth finds it unbelievable that life could dare to continue after the death of her husband, the surviving people of Judah find it unbelievable that creation could continue in the face of their suffering. Their lives have been undone, so they evoke a dystopian space of utter desolation in which everything has been undone.[2] Once again, we are seeing in the Book of Jeremiah a traumatised people coming to terms with their trauma, through a poetic and imaginative description of what their trauma feels like.

When we started this series on the prophecies of Jeremiah, I said the Book of Jeremiah makes no chronological sense, switches between speakers and images, and includes a mixture of poetry, sermons, and biographical pieces. Today’s passage is one of those that switches from speaker to speaker. At the very end of today’s reading, we are told ‘For thus says the Lord,’ which means we know that it is the Lord who is warning that ‘the earth shall mourn, and the heavens above grow black’. Has it been the Lord who has been speaking all the way through? Is it God who has been looking at the destruction of the earth and the heavens? Is it the prophet Jeremiah? Is it the figure called ‘daughter Zion’ in other places in this book (Jeremiah 6:2); the personification of the city of Jerusalem? We know that the passage is describing what the people’s trauma feels like; is the Lord or the prophet experiencing that pain with them?

The lectionary cuts out what might be the most interesting part of the chapter. Immediately before ‘For my people are foolish, they do not know me,’ we read:

My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh, the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent; for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Disaster overtakes disaster, the whole land is laid waste. Suddenly my tents are destroyed, my curtains in a moment. How long must I see the standard, and hear the sound of the trumpet? (Jeremiah 4:19-21)

Ancient readers decided that the person writhing in anguish is Jeremiah himself. The Lord is telling him to prophecy harm against the people, but seeing the judgement that will fall upon them causes Jeremiah agony. This is one of the moments in the Book that challenges the idea that Judah has deserved what is coming to it. Something that causes the prophet so much hurt cannot be justified, no matter how foolish the people are. Have stupid children without understanding really earned disaster upon disaster?

Another suggestion is that the speaker is God; it is God who is experiencing anguish at the judgement that he is being forced to carry out against his people. Hosea prophesied of a God who said, ‘My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.’ (Hosea 11:8) Maybe we are again seeing into the soul of a loving God whose nature is compassion and mercy, who knows that for the people’s own good they must be chastised, but who regrets it. In that case, it may also be God who is saying, ‘I looked, and lo’. God the Creator may be mourning the harm caused to the good creation by human wrongdoing, even if it is the Lord himself and his ‘fierce anger’ that has executed that harm. The message that human wrongdoing can harm creation is more resonant today than it was in the sixth century BCE. Then, people thought that their sins might affect the earth; we know that our misuse of creation can create ‘natural’ disasters. Australia is the world leader in mammal extinction, for instance; maybe God is saying to us, ‘I looked at Australian mammals, and lo, thirty-eight species had been driven to extinction between 1788 and 2025’.

After all this grief, there is a moment of hope. ‘For thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.’ Most commentators agree that this was a later addition by a scribe who knew that the people of Judah had survived the Babylonian Empire. But as the text stands, it reads as ambivalence in God’s heart. The Lord is definite, ‘I have not relented nor will I turn back,’ but equally, God’s punishment is not the ‘full end’. We must wait for some weeks, but eventually we will hear:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah … this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jeremiah 31:31-33)

Despite the horror and judgement of the Book of Jeremiah, there is always, always, a hint of hope. Desolation never has the final word.

In the meantime, when, like Elizabeth, you experience grief so overwhelming that it feels impossible that life can continue, and none of us will escape this life without that experience, know that both the prophet Jeremiah and the God for whom he speaks understand.

[1] Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die (2024), p. 318.

[2] Elizabeth Boase, Trauma Theories: Refractions in the Book of Jeremiah (2024), pp. 95.