All Ye That Pass By

We hear this line as Christ on the cross saying it about himself. That is where the verse lives in our ears, and getting it back to where it lives on the page takes an effort.

On the page it is a city. Lamentations opens with Jerusalem sitting in her own rubble, personified as a widow. How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! The walls are down, the temple is burned, the people are gone, and she is calling out to the traffic 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 finish is what a concert hall cannot carry. Which is done unto me, wherewith the LORD hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger. She names who did it. Six verses later she says the rest of it without softening a word: The LORD is righteous; for I have rebelled against his commandment.

That is a grief with her own hand in it, and she does not stop grieving on that account. She goes on asking to be looked at. For these things I weep; mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water. What she wants from the passers-by is that they stop walking.

Most sorrow is more like hers than like an innocent one. There is usually some part of the wreckage a person can trace back to their own decisions, and that part is exactly why people carry the whole thing alone, on the assumption that a deserved grief forfeits any claim to comfort. The men who put this book in the canon did not think so. It runs five chapters and it never hurries.

Stop reading now. Do not answer any of it, and do not go looking for the verse that fixes it. Sit for a few minutes with a sorrow you believe you have no right to, and let it be looked at.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 74 is Generational Faithfulness (Psalm 119:90).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two