Rachel Weeping

On a hilltop north of Jerusalem, a sound carries on the wind. Not singing. Not laughter. A woman weeping, the deep crying of a mother who will not be comforted.

The prophet Jeremiah lived through the worst days in Judah's history, about six hundred years before Jesus. He warned for forty years that Babylon would come, and it did. Jerusalem was besieged and burned. The temple was destroyed. Thousands of people were marched away into exile, hundreds of miles to Babylon. Families were torn apart. In the middle of all this sorrow, God gave Jeremiah a group of chapters full of hope, sometimes called the Book of Consolation. And in chapter thirty-one, God speaks about a mother crying for her children.

“Thus says the Lord: A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping. Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.” Rachel was one of the great mothers of Israel, the wife of Jacob, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. She had died long before, giving birth to Benjamin on the road near Bethlehem. Now Jeremiah pictures her, like a grandmother of the whole nation, weeping as her children are taken away. Ramah was a town in the land of Benjamin. Her sorrow is too deep for words. She refuses comfort, because her children are gone.

But God does not leave her crying. He speaks to her directly. “Thus says the Lord: Refrain your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears. For your work shall be rewarded, says the Lord, and they shall come again from the land of the enemy.” Stop crying, Rachel. Your love and your labour as a mother have not been wasted. Your children will come back. And then the words that give the chapter its heart. “And there is hope in your end, says the Lord, that your children shall come again to their own border.” There is hope for your future. God does not tell Rachel that her tears are silly, or that nothing bad has happened. He tells her that sorrow will not have the final word.

The verses around this promise are full of homecoming. God says he will turn their mourning into joy. Young women will dance, young men and old together. Watchmen will call out on the hills of Ephraim, let us go up to Zion to the Lord our God. God says, I have loved you with an everlasting love. And just a little later in the same chapter, God promises a new covenant, when he will write his law on his people's hearts and forgive their sin. Rachel's tears are real. But they are not the end of the story.

Ramah was not chosen at random. Later in his book, Jeremiah tells us that after Jerusalem fell, the Babylonians gathered the captives at Ramah, before marching them away into exile. Jeremiah himself was there in chains, and was set free by the Babylonian captain of the guard. Ramah was the place of goodbye. And the Bible remembers Rachel's tomb as lying in that same region, on the way to Bethlehem.

Rachel weeping. You can read it in Jeremiah chapter thirty-one, verses fifteen to seventeen. Matthew remembered these words when he told how King Herod's soldiers came to Bethlehem looking for the child Jesus, and mothers wept. The Christmas story holds real sorrow. But the God who answered Rachel with hope sent the child who escaped that night, and who would one day wipe away every tear. So here is a question to carry with you. God told Rachel there was hope for her future. Who do you know who is sad this Christmas, and how could you bring them hope?