Look on My Affliction

Jerusalem calls to everyone passing by: is this nothing to you? Look around and see. Her sorrow is so great that she asks strangers to stop treating it as background scenery.

She says the LORD has brought this suffering on the day of His fierce anger. Fire from above has overpowered her bones, a net has trapped her feet, and she has been left desolate. The images describe a person who cannot find a way out of the consequences surrounding her.

Her transgressions are pictured as a yoke tied together and placed across her neck. The burden is not random. It has been gathered from many acts of rebellion and now presses with a weight she cannot throw off.

The Lord has rejected the warriors in her midst and summoned an army against her young men. The city is pictured like grapes crushed in a winepress. It is a severe image, and the poem does not soften it for the sake of comfort.

For these things, Jerusalem weeps. There is no one nearby to comfort her or revive her. Her children are destitute because the enemy has prevailed. Zion reaches out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her. Even the neighbors have become foes because the LORD has decreed judgment against Jacob.

Jeremiah speaks of a wound that seemed beyond healing, while the Psalms assure us that the LORD hears the brokenhearted. Together they help us avoid two errors. Sin can have real and devastating consequences, and God is not absent from people whose suffering is severe.

The city asks people to look before they explain. A person in pain may need truthful words, but first she needs someone to recognize the pain. Compassion does not cancel confession. It keeps confession from becoming another way to look away.