Nehemiah's Response to Grief

The book of Nehemiah is not exactly a focus of most preaching or lay reflection. A good number of people don't even know that there is a book of Nehemiah in the Bible! In addition, what little preaching I've heard on Nehemiah tends to focus on how great a leader Nehemiah was for going to Jerusalem and spearheading the effort to rebuild the city's defenses. And this is indeed true, and can offer good contemporary points of application. But to limit the story of Nehemiah to leadership only is to miss a great deal. Nehemiah chapter 1 offers a rather comprehensive response to grief that we also find in the life of Christ himself. In this post, I'd like to discuss one particular aspect of Nehemiah's response to grief.

In Nehemiah 1.4, it says that Nehemiah wept over the plight of the Israelites. But what was so bad about the condition of the Jewish remnant that caused Nehemiah to do this? A little bit of background; Nehemiah is writing while in Babylon, hundreds of miles away from the Promised Land. He is writing about one hundred years after the end of the Jewish exile from Israel at the hands of the Babylonians. For one hundred years, Jews had been returning to Israel to rebuild their nation. But in vv1-3, Nehemiah receives a report that the new nation is in serious trouble. Its capital city Jerusalem is defenseless because the defensive wall around the city has not been rebuilt. What’s important to see here is that the condition of Jerusalem’s defenses here are basically the same as they were over a hundred years ago when the Babylonians originally destroyed the city and sent the people into exile. In other words, the Jewish people had been returning to the land for multiple generations by the time of Nehemiah, but were not rebuilding the nation. Nehemiah, who is hundreds of miles away in Babylon, sees this as a full-scale national crisis. Think of how all of us felt in the aftermath of 9/11. We felt like we were immediately in a national crisis right then and there. Yet here in Nehemiah, this national crisis has been going on for a hundred years now. So Nehemiah properly responds to this crisis by weeping and mourning.

But notice two things about Nehemiah’s mourning. First, he was not ashamed to mourn. Nehemiah was a great man of God, someone of strong faith. Yet, he mourns without shame. But second, notice also that Nehemiah doesn’t just have one good cry and then moves on. Verse 4 says that he wept and mourned for some days. Nehemiah didn’t treat mourning as something to cross off his ‘Honey-do’ list, and neither should we. There’s this persistent idea that Christians shouldn’t grieve and mourn, because to do so somehow reflects something negative about their faith. Well, somebody forgot to tell this to Nehemiah. He mourns because he should be mourning. See, it is often the case that grief over the same event comes and goes over time with varying degrees of intensity, and is often cyclical. Mourning is not a bullet-point to be scratched off the list like some finite chore. Nehemiah is giving us an honest look at grief, as well as a realistic portrayal of humanity.

This is tough stuff because most of us, as human beings, like bullet-points. We like our sermons that way, and we like our lives that way too. The larger culture often tells us to avoid, minimize or eliminate our grief because after all, grief is a hindrance to a happy life. But folks, it just ain’t that simple – we’re not that simple. And if you don’t believe me, all we have to do is look at Jesus himself. The God-man, who knew all things and had all power, wept at the grave of Lazarus in John 11. He wept even though he knew full well that just a few minutes later, he would raise Lazarus from the dead. Does Jesus’ grief sound simple to anyone? I don’t think so. So if you’re in the midst of a painful season of grief and crisis, take comfort in what both Nehemiah and Jesus show us. It’s okay to mourn. It’s necessary to mourn. It is purposeful to mourn. This is positively counter-cultural, and I know it may feel a little strange. But give your sorrows and grief to the God-man of sorrows who was acquainted with grief (Is. 53.3), and he will meet you there and care for you.

Much more could be said about Nehemiah's response to grief in chs. 1-2. In addition to mourning, the opening verses of Nehemiah also tell us that he fasted and prayed continuously (mourning does not entail inaction). He then takes the additional step of taking responsibility. Notice in v7 that when he prays to God, he doesn't say 'those people in Jerusalem' have acted wickedly, or that 'previous generations' have not obeyed God's commands. Instead, he says 'we' have been unfaithful. This is simply incredible. Nehemiah was not in Israel goofing off while the defenses of Jerusalem lay in ruins. It wasn’t Nehemiah who originally went back to the land and decided to leave the ruins as is rather than rebuild. Nehemiah is hundreds of miles away and hasn’t been in Jerusalem for years! Yet, here he is lumping himself in with everyone else, and accepting responsibility for the dismal state of affairs in Jerusalem (which then leads to him personally taking ownership over the defensive wall project in chapter 2). Now you may say, “Hey, I didn’t know word one about Nehemiah before today, but still, all this sounds kinda familiar!” Well, you would be right, because Nehemiah’s act of identifying himself with the people was something of a temporal picture of what Jesus supremely did for us. In John 17, as Jesus prays to the Father before being led off to the crucifixion, he identifies himself with his people. Beginning in John 17.21, Jesus prays that his people would be in him just as he is with the Father. We are sinners, while Jesus is not. Yet, he identified himself with us and took on the penalty of our sins so that those of us who belong to him through faith might have eternal and permanent peace with God.

Put simply, Nehemiah gives us a full-orbed response to grief that should serve as a model for us as we struggle and strive with difficulty, disappointment, and despair. Nehemiah, like Jesus, doesn't shrug off grief by trying to minimize it or falsely pretend that it's not that painful. Nor does Nehemiah wallow in his grief to the point of complete withdrawal and paralysis. Many of us know people who fall into both categories. But Nehemiah offers a different way, a truer and more authentic way of grappling with life's struggles. Take comfort O Christian - suffering and grief do not render your faith useless!