An Encounter with Mercy

“The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.” (Lamentations 3:19-20)

Does that sound familiar?

We might not use the same words as the prophet Jeremiah—“my affliction is wormwood and gall”—but I suspect we’ve all experienced that same debilitating level of mental anguish. Wormwood and Gall are horrible-tasting herbs. They are bitter, and life can indeed be bitter. So, we lie in bed, tossing and turning, wishing we could sleep, but our minds remain fixated on our pain.

“My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.” (Lamentations 3:20)

I remember as a teenager doing a short stint in what we called a ‘Happy Clappy Church.’ It was filled with happy, dancing, smiling people who waved their hands in the air as they sang and danced. It was alluring, but when I started attending regularly, I found that we were all under quite a bit of pressure to always look happy. Indeed, if things weren’t going too well, you were expected to ‘fake it till you make it’.

There are stigmas associated with depression, and it’s often worse in the church than in the rest of the community. We religious folk pedal a message of love, joy, health and peace, and, yes, that’s a hard product to sell if you’re depressed. Even so, I find it affirming that there is an entire book in the Hebrew Bible given over to chronicling the mental pain of the prophet Jeremiah.

“How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She who was a princess among the provinces has become subject to forced labour.” (Lamentations 1:1)

That’s how the Book of Lamentations starts. Jeremiah is sitting among the ruins of his once great city. The once-bustling streets are empty. So many people he knew are now dead. He’d spent his life warning people that this was coming, and, for the most part, he’d been mocked and abused for saying it. The Babylonians proved him right in the year 587 B.C. Even so, this brought him no satisfaction whatsoever.

The way Jeremiah depicts his desolated homeland sounds a lot like what we are seeing right now in Gaza, and that too should be a cause of lament. Through our social media, we get a Jeremiah-like view of the devastation of Gaza and broader Palestine, and I find it hard to laugh and dance and sing while my Palestinian sisters and brothers are being tortured and killed. Even so, this is where Jeremiah speaks to us again, this time with words of hope:

“But this I call to mind”, says the prophet, “and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:21–23)

Jeremiah’s pivot is not a denial of his pain. It’s not a “fake it till you make it” smile. It’s a theological and emotional breakthrough that gives him clarity in the fog of grief. He isn’t forgetting the destruction of Jerusalem or minimising the trauma, but he remembers something deeper – that divine love is not extinguished by catastrophe and that mercy is not a one-time gift – that faithfulness is not a feeling but a fact!

This is the solution—not in the sense of a quick fix, but in the sense of a spiritual anchor. Jeremiah’s hope is not naive optimism. It’s hard-won trust. It’s the kind of hope that only emerges when everything else has been stripped away. And it’s this kind of hope that we desperately need today.

Our world feels like it’s falling apart—politically, environmentally, and spiritually. As in the time of Jeremiah, cities burn, people are killed, communities mourn and prophets weep. Even so, lament is not the end of the story, and the very act of lamenting—of naming our pain—is itself a form of faith. It says, “What is happening matters, and it matters to God!” And when we reach the point of remembering that “His mercies never come to an end”, we are not escaping reality but reclaiming it!

Jeremiah says God’s mercies are “new every morning.” Morning, the prophet reminds us, is not just a time of day but a time of renewal. After the long night of tossing and turning, after the bitter taste of wormwood and gall, morning comes, and with it, mercy. We rise, we remember, and we receive!

“Great is your faithfulness,” concludes the prophet. That line has been sung in countless hymns, but in Jeremiah’s mouth, it’s not sentimental. It’s visionary, and it’s defiant. It’s a declaration made in the ruins that better days will come. It’s a cry against injustice, a refusal to normalise violence, and it’s a call to remember that God’s heart breaks with ours.

Wormwood and gall are bitter. But they are also medicinal. In ancient traditions, they were used to purge, to cleanse and to heal, and perhaps that is part of the symbolism here. Our affliction is bitter—but it can also be transformative. It can strip away illusions. It can deepen our compassion. It can prepare us to receive mercy anew. When we dare to lament, we make space for an encounter with mercy.