Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 74 · March 15
All Ye That Pass By
“Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the LORD hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.”
Most of us hear this line as the voice of Christ on the cross, speaking about Himself, because that is how it is often sung. It takes some effort to hear it where it stands on the page.
On the page, the one speaking is a city. Lamentations opens with Jerusalem sitting in her own rubble, pictured as a widow: "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!" Her gates are desolate, enemies have walked into her sanctuary, and her people have gone into captivity. Now she calls out to the travellers on the road that runs past her: "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow."
Then she finishes the sentence, and the ending is the part that usually gets left out: "which is done unto me, wherewith the LORD hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger." She names who has done this. Six verses later she says the rest without softening a word: "The LORD is righteous; for I have rebelled against his commandment."
So this is a grief with her own hand in it, and she does not stop grieving because of that. She keeps asking to be seen: "For these things I weep; mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water." What she wants from the people passing by is for them to stop walking and look.
Most sorrow is more like hers than we admit. There is usually some part of the wreckage a person can trace back to their own choices, and that part is exactly why so many carry the whole thing alone. They assume that a grief they deserved has given up any right to comfort. God did not think so. He put this book in the Bible, and it runs for five chapters without once hurrying the grief along. In the middle of the book, the writer finds a reason to wait: "It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD."
So stop reading now. Do not try to answer any of it, and do not go looking for the verse that fixes it. Sit quietly for a few minutes with a sorrow you believe you have no right to, and let God look at it with you. He is in no hurry, and He has not walked past.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 74 is Generational Faithfulness (Psalm 119:90).