The Unanswerable Grief Text: Lamentations 2:13
Introduction: When the Comparisons Run Out
We live in a therapeutic age. When tragedy strikes, our first impulse is to find the right words of comfort, to offer a comparison, to say, "I know how you feel," or "This is just like that other thing, and they got through it." We believe that shared experience is the ultimate balm. We try to domesticate grief by categorizing it, by finding a neat little box to put it in. But what happens when the calamity is so profound, so all-encompassing, that all our comparisons fail? What happens when the wound is so deep that all our therapeutic platitudes sound like cheap mockery?
This is where the prophet Jeremiah finds himself in the smoking ruins of Jerusalem. The book of Lamentations is a masterfully structured expression of grief, but it is not the kind of grief our culture understands. It is not a private, sentimental journey. It is a public, covenantal, theological lament over a national catastrophe. And the catastrophe is this: God Himself, in righteous anger, has dismantled His own house and disinherited His own people for their flagrant, high-handed rebellion. This is not a random act of violence; it is a judicial sentence, executed with terrible precision.
In our text today, the prophet, speaking by the Spirit, attempts to do what any comforter would do. He tries to find a parallel, a category, a comparison for Jerusalem's suffering. But he cannot. The grief is singular. The ruin is unique. He is a comforter who has run out of comparisons, a counselor struck dumb by the sheer scale of the disaster. And in this failure of human comparison, we are driven to the very heart of the matter. When your ruin is as vast as the sea, you are forced to look beyond all human help. When no one on earth can heal you, you are finally in a position to look to heaven.
The Text
What shall I testify about you?
To what shall I equate you,
O daughter of Jerusalem?
To what shall I liken you as I comfort you,
O virgin daughter of Zion?
For your destruction is as vast as the sea;
Who can heal you?
(Lamentations 2:13 LSB)
The Search for a Parallel (v. 13a)
The verse opens with a series of frantic, grasping questions.
"What shall I testify about you? To what shall I equate you, O daughter of Jerusalem? To what shall I liken you as I comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion?" (Lamentations 2:13a)
Jeremiah is searching his mind for a historical precedent, an analogous situation that might offer a sliver of comfort. To "testify" here means to bring forward a case study, an example. He is asking, "What story can I tell that matches yours? What other great city has fallen from such a height? What other nation, so beloved by God, has been so thoroughly wrecked by Him?" He is trying to find a category for this suffering so that he can say, "See? Sodom was destroyed, but this is different because... The Egyptians were drowned, but you are not like them because..." But the words fail him.
He asks what he can "equate" with her, or "liken" to her. This is the work of a comforter. We try to build a bridge of understanding. But all the bridges have been washed out. Jerusalem's position was unique. She was the "daughter of Jerusalem," the city of the great King. She was the "virgin daughter of Zion," a title that speaks of her privileged, protected, and supposedly inviolable status. She was God's chosen, set apart from all other nations. And so, her sin was unique. Her rebellion was not the common pagan idolatry; it was spiritual adultery, committed in the very house of her husband. Consequently, her judgment had to be uniquely terrible.
There is a profound lesson here. When we are counseling those in the midst of profound suffering, especially suffering that is the direct result of their own sin, our first job is not to minimize it. It is not to rush in with cheap grace or easy comparisons. True comfort begins with acknowledging the full, terrifying reality of the situation. Jeremiah's inability to find a comparison is, in fact, the beginning of true comfort. It honors the depth of the wound. It says, "This is as bad as you think it is. In fact, it is worse than you can imagine." Only when we have faced the utter uniqueness of our ruin can we appreciate the utter uniqueness of the grace that can save us from it.
The Boundless Breach (v. 13b)
Having failed to find a comparison, the prophet then explains why. He provides the reason for his speechlessness.
"For your destruction is as vast as the sea..." (Lamentations 2:13b)
The word for destruction here is "breach" or "breaking." It is a covenantal term. God had set a wall of protection around His people, and they, through their sin, had breached it. Now, the judgment of God has poured through that breach, and the result is a ruin as vast, as deep, and as overwhelming as the ocean. Think about this metaphor. You can stand on the shore and see the sea, but you cannot see the other side. You cannot measure its depths. You cannot control its power. It is a symbol of the infinite, the uncontrollable, the terrifyingly immense.
This is what the judgment of God is like when it finally arrives. It is not a tidy, manageable affair. It is a flood. All the landmarks are gone. All the foundations are washed away. The prophet is saying that the ruin of Jerusalem is not a puddle that will dry up in the afternoon sun. It is a shoreless ocean of desolation. There is no human landmark to get your bearings. There is no bottom to touch with your feet. This is what happens when a people who have been exalted to heaven in privilege presume upon God's grace and live like hell. The fall is not a minor stumble; it is a fall from the battlements of heaven into the abyss.
Our generation needs to hear this. We have made God into a manageable deity. He is our buddy, our therapist, our life coach. We have forgotten that He is the Holy One of Israel, that His wrath against sin is not a mild displeasure but a consuming fire. We have forgotten that covenant-breaking has consequences, and those consequences are as vast as the sea. The wreckage of Western civilization, a civilization built on the foundations of the gospel, is a modern testament to this truth. We have breached the covenant, and the sea is pouring in.
The Hopeless Question (v. 13c)
The verse concludes with a question that hangs in the air over the rubble of the city. It is the only logical question to ask in the face of a sea of ruin.
"Who can heal you?" (Lamentations 2:13c)
This is a rhetorical question, and the implied answer is devastating: No one. No one can heal you. The Babylonians who destroyed you certainly cannot heal you. The Egyptians you foolishly tried to ally with cannot heal you. The false prophets who promised you "peace, peace" cannot heal you. And you, shattered and broken, most certainly cannot heal yourself.
The breach is too great for any human surgeon. The sickness is a terminal cancer that no human physician can cure. This is the end of all human boasting, all self-reliance, all political solutions, and all bootstrap moralism. The patient is on the table, and the doctors have all walked out of the room, shaking their heads. The ruin is total. The situation is, from a human perspective, utterly and completely hopeless.
And this is precisely the point. The law, in its covenantal fury, brings us to this place. It brings us to the end of ourselves. It shows us a breach as vast as the sea and asks, "Who can heal you?" in order to force us to confess, "No one. Nothing. I am undone." It is only from the depths of that confession, from that place of absolute spiritual bankruptcy, that we can finally look in the right direction for a healer.
The Healer Who Crosses the Sea
The Old Testament is constantly setting up problems that it cannot solve on its own terms. It paints a picture of a ruin so complete, a sin so deep, a breach so vast, that no man can fix it. And it does this to create a longing, a desperate expectation, for a divine rescuer. Who can heal this? The question is left unanswered in Lamentations, but it is answered definitively on a hill outside the very same city of Jerusalem.
Who can heal you? God can. The one who wounded is the only one who can heal (Deut. 32:39). The one who tore to pieces is the one who must bind up the wound (Hosea 6:1). And how does He do it? He does it by sending a Healer who willingly enters the breach, who plunges into the sea of our desolation.
On the cross, Jesus Christ looked upon the full, terrifying breach between God and man. He saw our ruin, a ruin infinitely more vast than the destruction of Jerusalem, a ruin as deep as hell itself. And He did not stand on the shore, speechless. He willingly became the "daughter of Zion" for us. He was forsaken so that we might be comforted. He endured a destruction as vast as the sea of God's own wrath.
The prophet asked, "To what shall I liken you?" The gospel answers: we are like Christ on the cross. He was equated with our sin. He was made to be the singular example of covenant curse so that we might become the singular example of covenant blessing. His ruin was unparalleled so that our healing could be unparalleled.
Therefore, the question "Who can heal you?" has its final, glorious answer. Jesus can. He is the great physician. He did not simply patch the breach; He filled it with His own body. He did not simply calm the sea of our sin and guilt; He swallowed it whole in His death and resurrection. For the Christian, therefore, there is no such thing as a hopeless situation. Our ruin may be as vast as the sea, but His grace is deeper still. Your sin may be a boundless ocean, but the blood of Jesus is a greater ocean that swallows it up entirely.
This is the comfort that Jeremiah could only long for. It is the comfort that is offered to us freely in the gospel. Do not look to politics, or therapy, or self-improvement to heal the great breach in your own soul or in our culture. Look to the one who was broken for you. Confess that your ruin is total, and then rejoice that His healing is even more so.