A spring of tears for a thirsty people

Jeremiah is the prophet history remembers weeping. He preached for roughly forty years in Jerusalem, from the reign of Josiah through the slow collapse of Judah, and almost no one listened. His own neighbors in Anathoth turned on him. He was put in stocks, thrown into a muddy cistern, mocked, and ignored. And through all of it he kept saying the one thing the city did not want to hear: that judgment was coming from the north, and that it was coming because they had walked away from God.

What sets Jeremiah apart is not the warning. Other prophets warned. It is that he could not deliver the warning without breaking. “Oh, that my head were a spring of water,” he cries, “and my eyes a fountain of tears! I would weep day and night over the slain daughter of my people.” He does not stand above his people and pronounce doom. He stands inside their coming grief and wishes he had more water in him to mourn it.

Underneath the tears is a diagnosis, and it is the clearest sentence in the book. “My people have committed two evils,” God says through him. “They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns – broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” The whole tragedy fits in one picture. There was a spring. They left it. And the substitutes they cut for themselves leak.

A friend of mine grew up on land in the dry hill country, where every drop of water had to be thought about. Behind the old farmhouse there was a spring his great-grandfather had built the whole place around. It ran clear and cold through every drought anyone could remember. Free water, rising out of the rock on its own.

Somewhere along the way a later owner decided the spring was inconvenient – too far from the house, down a slope, hard to pipe. So he dug a cistern up near the kitchen and let the spring path grow over. The cistern was closer. It was also, eventually, cracked. My friend remembers his father standing over that empty pit in August, in the heat, while a hundred yards down the hill the spring kept running to no one.

That is the picture Jeremiah cannot say without weeping. Not a people with no water. A people standing beside living water, dying of thirst at a hole they dug because it felt more like theirs.

A priest’s son from Anathoth, called as a young man to prophesy in Jerusalem’s final decades, roughly 627 to after 586 BC. He warned of Babylon’s coming judgment for some forty years and was rejected, imprisoned, and lowered into a cistern for it. He is remembered above all for his grief: he could not announce his people’s coming ruin without weeping over it, carrying in himself the sorrow of the God he spoke for.