GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LAMENTATIONS 1:11-12
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Verse 11 brings the second part of the chapter to a close, which has been the realization that sin was the cause for this disaster (1:8-11).
11 All her people groan as they search for bread;
they trade their treasures for food just to keep alive.
“Look, O LORD, and see that I am despised.”
The search for bread, the simplest of food, has become a desperate daily struggle. Famine follows after war, because fields and people to work the fields have been wiped out. It does not mean that the people who are left behind are lazy– quite the reverse. There is simply no food left.
Jeremiah describes the final days: “By the ninth day of the fourth month, the famine was so severe in the city that there was no bread for the people of the land. Then a breach was made in the city wall, and all the men in the army fled. Since the Chaldeans had surrounded the city, the men left it at night by way of the gate between the two walls near the king’s garden. They fled toward the Arabah, but the Chaldean army pursued the king. They caught up with King Zedekiah in the plain near Jericho, where his whole army was scattered, and he was captured and taken to the king of Babylon at Riblah” (Jeremiah 52:6-10).
Verse 11 shows how desperate the days were: “They trade their treasures for food just to keep alive.” Nothing in the world retains its value when death’s jaws are open. People give anything, anything at all, to stay alive. For some parents, only love surpasses this emergency, and they give even their own lives to spare their children.
Life or death. For the Jews bearing the first cross, there was sometimes not even a choice as death overtook many. Jeremiah brings the terrible three together several times: “War, famine, and plague.” What one does not take, another claims, and what is left untaken and unclaimed, starves.
Life or death. For Christ our Lord suffering on the cross, it was love giving up life for the sake of his own beloved creation. For although Jesus Christ the son of Mary did not take a wife in his lifetime, and did not sire any physical children, we are all his children by virtue of the words he spoke: “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the livestock, and over all the earth” (Genesis 1:26). The Father’s will, the Spirit’s hovering inspection, and the Son’s Word of power. He made us, and he loves us. His love was such that physical life itself was the treasure he gave up, not to stay alive himself, but to bring spiritual life, forgiveness, and a place with him forever in heaven, to everyone who puts their faith in him.
Life or death. We do not think of our daily crosses as matters of life or death, but as burdens we carry on account of our faith. Yet they are evidence of life, real spiritual life set in our hearts by the Holy Spirit through the word of God and through our baptism. For I am not a great man. I am not Abraham, or Joseph, or David, or even Jehoshaphat. I am a humble child of God living late in the afternoon of the world. But I have been given life in my heart. Therefore a cross to bear, a burden, a loss; even a grief, is finally an honor. If my Lord puts weight in his opinion of me by laying a weight on my back as I walk the path of life in his world, then I will carry it. His grace is sufficient, even as crumbs are enough. And if it came down to giving all of the world’s treasures to pay for a little spiritual bread, to build my faith, then wouldn’t I gladly pay? What do I need with things, any things, if I have my Jesus in my heart? He will see to my needs if it comes to some desperate day. “Your Father in heaven gives good gifts to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:11).
12 “Is this nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see if there is any pain like my pain
which was laid so severely upon me.
The LORD inflicted this pain on the day of his fierce anger.
Beginning with verse 12, the rest of chapter 1 is a plea for mercy. In the poem, this is the city crying out to the world, to strangers who ride their camels and donkeys along the track to see the ruins of what was once Israel’s great city, now just rubble. No parapets. No towers. No banners. There were not even any walls anymore– just wreckage and ruin. And without the orders of a king, without the workforce of thousands of strong backs, without the directions of master builders who understood leverage and stresses, balance and the forces of nature when set one against another, there was no way even to clear safe pathways through the ruins. The first cross of the wrecked city asks, “Is there any pain like my pain?”
Christ our Lord was the only one able to truly ask that question as he bore the Great Cross, the Second Cross, the cross of our shame and guilt. “He was taken away without a fair trial and without justice, and of his generation, who even cared? So, he was cut off from the land of the living. He was struck because of the rebellion of my people” (Isaiah 53:8). What was laid on his shoulders was not just an oak four-by-four, seven feet long and full of splinters. It was death itself, unyielding and inevitable, an instrument of death perfected by the Romans but used to atone for our sins. His death spared us from everlasting suffering and pain. This is the message we share: “Mercy– that is, the grace of Christ, through the peaching of the Gospel– heals the wounds of souls and cools the fever of carnal sinfulness.”
When we read a verse like this we are lifted up from the terrible pain of our (third) crosses. We bear these momentary, earthly burdens on account of the devil’s fury over Christ and his hatred of God’s holy people. But we bear them in love. Our pain today is not the pain of the day of his anger, but only the same rage the world has always spat out at the faithful. Abel suffered on account of Cain’s jealousy, but Abel’s soul was lifted to heaven in the arms of angels. We will suffer (let it not be as severe as Abel’s suffering, O Lord), but we do so knowing that we have Jesus as our Savior and friend.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Lamentations 1:11-12 Is there any pain like my pain