We have already seen Jeremiah’s pain (4:19–21). Here it is again, but darker and more intense. It will get worse later. As he sees the sin of the people and contemplates their fate he is torn between weeping (v 1) and escaping (v 2). The opportunity has passed (v 20), there is no cure available (v 22). God has exhausted every other avenue (v 7). Any sensitive person would react as Jeremiah does. Paul has a similar reaction in Romans 9:1–3. When we respond in this way, we are reflecting the pain which God feels and which Jesus shows as he approaches Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–44). To be a prophet is not only to speak God’s word but to feel God’s pain. 

We are not all called to be prophets as Jeremiah was, or to the sort of missionary enterprise that Paul was, but we are, as followers of Jesus, called to be his representatives in a broken world. That will mean feeling something of God’s heart for the world especially as we see it in Jesus. It is easy to speak about judgement without feeling the pain, or to feel the pain and hold back from talk of judgement. But both must go alongside one another. 

Recall special holidays and thank God for the refreshed feeling you experienced as you returned home.

Some years ago I contributed to a file of secondary-school assemblies entitled Community Cohesion. Today’s passage paints a picture of a community that would benefit from such a file. As so often, sexual impropriety comes top of the list of ills (9:2), but much of the community breakdown has its roots in what people are saying to one another. They bend the truth (v 3), inform on one another to gain an advantage (v 4), slander and deceive (v 8). This has now become endemic (vs 5,6). Jeremiah has two options: to stay and endure deep, personal anguish (v 1) or to retreat to a desert refuge (v 2).

I, too, have sometimes longed to get away from the incessant daily diet fed by the media. I’m tempted by the lure of TV programmes such as Ben Fogle’s New Lives in the Wild or Escape to the Country, setting up home in rural isolation, with their promise of relief from the stress and complexity of living in a community. Over past decades my wife and I have at times welcomed the option of such a bolt-hole, whether a caravan, a cottage in France or our present motorhome, but it has only ever been a break, so that we might then return, refreshed, to life where we belong.

Community cohesion does not come through political and sociological strategies, scientific and philosophical analyses, or power and wealth (v 23). It can only come through knowing God in the relationship given to us by Jesus and in understanding his ways through the gift of the Holy Spirit (v 24). Equipped in this way, it’s our task to introduce our communities to his enduring love, his justice and his holy righteousness. Where we belong. We are God’s glue for his cohesion.

Choose three situations that grieve you within your local community: dispute between neighbours, a local injustice, personal slander, for example. Pray about them, then listen for what God invites you to do.