LIVING WATERS
For the proclamation of the Gospel and the edification of the Body of Christ
Crying for Jerusalem
The prophet Jeremiah is known as "the weeping prophet", for his book is full of emotion and tears for Judah. He is the prophet who says, for example: "Oh that my head were water, and mine eyes fountains of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!". However, his tears are not only his own - they are also God's weeping for the apostate nation. A nation that, despite multiple calls to repentance, now faces its last day. Jeremiah witnessed the fall of Jerusalem and the exodus of the exiles.
But Jeremiah is also the "weeping prophet" because he wrote the book of Lamentations. According to tradition, he wrote it while sitting on a nearby mountain, watching the devastation of the city. His words rise up then, in waves of growing pain, like a delicate moan, in imprecations and lamentations. His afflicted soul pours forth in heartbreaking metaphors.
Then he repeats one in particular, that of the woman. Jerusalem is a woman: had not God been her Beloved and she the beloved, whom God had washed, bejeweled and clothed with beauty? But now Jerusalem is the adulterous woman who has become "as a widow", and weeps bitterly in the night. She had once been beautiful, but then she gave herself to her lovers, who humiliated and abandoned her. She "sighs", and laments, as she looks at her filthy garments: "I cried out to my lovers, but they have deceived me".
The prophet then pities her and says to her: "Great as the sea is thy calamity, who shall heal thee?". There is nothing to be done now but to weep, so he invites her to do so: "O daughter of Zion, shed tears like a brook day and night; rest not, neither let the apple of thine eye cease". Then the prophet reproaches the false prophets because they "saw for you vanity and folly; and they did not uncover your sin to prevent your captivity, but preached to you vain prophecies and misguidance".
This is Jeremiah, "the weeping prophet". The image of Jeremiah weeping over Jerusalem is repeated almost six hundred years later. It is not Jeremiah, of course, but Jesus, with whom his contemporaries found a certain resemblance. He also weeps, and in his weeping he says: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to you, how often would I have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate; and I say unto you, ye shall not see me, until the time come when ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord".
The city is not yet desolate; however, Jesus can see it as it would be forty years later. Exactly as Jeremiah saw it.
But the image of a prophet weeping over Jerusalem has a third manifestation. Today the true Jerusalem -the church- is also desolate, and the Lord Jesus again weeps over its ruins. It is the weeping of Christ for his unfaithful beloved. Almost everything Jeremiah says about that widow in Lamentations is applicable today to the church. Will today's prophets join in Christ's weeping over his beloved, as Jeremiah did in anticipation of Jerusalem?