There is a kind of pain that makes us cry.
And then there is another kind of pain—quieter, heavier—that eventually makes us stop.
We live in a world where suffering is no longer rare. It is constant. It streams. It scrolls. It updates every few minutes. War. Displacement. Hunger. Violence. Loneliness. Loss. Tragedies stacked so closely together that we barely finish processing one before the next arrives.
At some point, something happens inside us.
Not rebellion.
Not cruelty.
Not even disbelief.
Just… numbness.
And the question I want to ask this morning is not a dramatic one. It is a human one:
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How much pain can a heart absorb before it goes numb?
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Not how much pain can the world endure.
Not how much pain should we care about.
But how much can a human heart actually take before it starts shutting doors just to survive?
The Bible does not avoid that question.
In fact, one entire book exists because someone refused to numb himself to it.
— THE SOUND OF A CITY THAT CAN NO LONGER FEEL
Lamentations opens with no explanation, no solution, no sermon outline—just a cry.
“How deserted lies the city, once so full of people…”
This is not metaphor for Jeremiah.
This is not poetic exaggeration.
This is a man standing in the rubble of Jerusalem after 586 BC—after famine, siege, slaughter, exile. Homes gone. Families gone. Children gone.
And the most disturbing thing he notices is not only the destruction.
It is the reaction of the passersby.
People are walking past the ruins.
And they feel… nothing.
So the city itself speaks—not angrily, not accusingly—but pleading:
“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?”
That is not a rebuke.
That is a question born of disbelief.
How can this mean nothing?
— NUMBNESS IS NOT THE SAME AS INDIFFERENCE
Here is something we need to say carefully.
Numbness is not the same as hardness.
Numbness is often what happens after caring has hurt too much for too long.
Sometimes the heart doesn’t shut down because it doesn’t love.
It shuts down because it has loved deeply—and is exhausted.
Jeremiah is not condemning emotionless monsters.
He is lamenting what happens when suffering becomes so familiar that people no longer know how to respond.
— WHEN SUFFERING SPEAKS AND GOD SEEMS SILENT
One of the most striking things about Lamentations 1 is who is speaking and who is not.
Jerusalem speaks.
Suffering speaks.
The wounded city finds a voice.
But God does not speak back.
That silence matters.
Verse after verse, the city describes what has happened:
• honor turned to shame
• abundance turned to hunger
• intimacy turned to isolation
And then comes the line that sits at the emotional center of the chapter:
“Look, O Lord, and consider, for I am despised… Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?”
Notice what the city is not asking.
It is not asking:
• “Why did this happen?”
• “Who is to blame?”
• “How do we fix this?”
It is asking something far more fragile:
“Does anyone still see this?”
“Does anyone still feel this?”
And perhaps hardest of all:
“God, do You?”
Lamentations does not rush to defend God.
It does not soften the blow.
It does not tidy up the theology.
It leaves the question hanging.
— THE TEMPTATION TO PASS BY
The people Jeremiah sees are not villains.
They are not mocking.
They are not celebrating the destruction.
They are simply passing by.
That phrase matters.
To pass by means:
• to keep moving
• to maintain distance
• to avoid involvement
And the text never tells us why they pass by.
Perhaps they are afraid.
Perhaps they are tired.
Perhaps they have seen too much already.
Perhaps they are protecting what little stability they have left.
The Bible does not speculate.
It only records the tragedy that when suffering becomes familiar, movement replaces mercy.
And the most haunting thing about verse 12 is that it is spoken not in anger, but in astonishment.
How can you walk past this?
— WHEN EVEN HUNGER LOSES ITS VOICE
By the time we reach verse 11, something else has happened.
The people are no longer even described as protesting.
“All her people groan as they search for bread.”
They are not organizing.
They are not crying out for justice.
They are bartering treasures for food—trying to stay alive one more day.
This is what prolonged suffering does.
It shrinks the horizon.
Faith becomes survival.
Hope becomes calories.
Prayer becomes breath.
And when a heart lives too long at that level, it does not rebel—it narrows.
This is not spiritual failure.
It is human limitation.
— GOD ALLOWS THE QUESTION TO STAND
Here is something deeply important.
God includes this book in Scripture.
Which means:
• God allows His people to say, “Does this mean nothing?”
• God does not censor the ache
• God does not correct the tone
• God does not interrupt the lament with answers
Lamentations exists because God would rather receive our honest numbness than our polished silence.
The text teaches us that faith is not proven by how quickly we recover,
but by whether we are still willing to bring our wounded questions into God’s presence.
— HOW WE LEARNED TO PASS BY
One of the reasons Lamentations still unsettles us is that we recognize the posture.
We know what it means to pass by.
We pass by with information.
We pass by with headlines.
We pass by with updates that arrive faster than our hearts can process them.
We are not untouched by suffering—we are overexposed to it.
And over time, exposure does something subtle.
It doesn’t make us cruel.
It makes us selective.
We begin to ration attention.
We begin to manage compassion.
We decide—quietly, unconsciously—what we can afford to feel.
Not because we don’t care.
But because caring has started to cost more than we know how to pay.
So we pass by.
Not dramatically.
Not defiantly.
Just… efficiently.
— PASSING BY DOESN’T REQUIRE MALICE
Here is something this text helps us understand about ourselves.
You don’t have to be heartless to pass by.
You only have to be occupied.
Occupied with responsibility.
Occupied with survival.
Occupied with keeping your own life from unraveling.
The people walking past Jerusalem were not celebrating her fall.
They were continuing their lives.
And that is what makes the question so piercing:
“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?”
Because it exposes a painful truth:
Suffering doesn’t need our hatred.
It only needs our inattention.
— THE COST OF ALWAYS KEEPING MOVING
There is a cost to passing by, even when it feels necessary.
When we pass by often enough:
• sorrow becomes abstract
• people become categories
• pain becomes noise
And eventually, something inside us grows quieter too.
Not just empathy.
Not just concern.
But joy.
Because the same heart that numbs itself to pain
eventually dulls its capacity for wonder, gratitude, and tenderness.
The Bible understands this.
That is why lament exists—not to trap us in grief, but to keep our hearts alive.
— GOD DOES NOT SCOLD THE NUMB
What is remarkable is what God does not do in this chapter.
God does not say:
• “Try harder to care.”
• “Do more.”
• “Feel more deeply.”
God allows the question to be asked.
Which suggests something important:
God is more concerned with our presence than our performance.
He would rather we admit,
“I don’t feel what I think I should feel,”
than pretend we are fine.
Passing by becomes dangerous not when we are tired—but when we stop noticing that we are.
— A QUIET TURN TOWARD HOPE
This is where we must be careful. Lamentations will eventually speak of hope. But it does not force it prematurely.
Hope that arrives too quickly feels like denial. Hope that ignores grief feels dishonest.
So for now, the text leaves us with awareness.
Not guilt.
Not shame.
Awareness.
The awareness that:
• numbness is real
• passing by is easy
• and God is still listening when we ask uncomfortable questions
— THE ONE WHO DID NOT PASS BY
If Lamentations leaves us with a question—
“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?”—
the Christian faith dares to say that question did not remain unanswered.
Because there came a moment in history when God Himself refused to pass by.
Christ does not enter the world from a safe distance.
He does not observe suffering from the margins.
He does not explain it away.
He steps into it.
The Gospels never show Jesus hurrying past pain.
Never show Him averting His eyes.
Never show Him calculating the cost before stopping.
Again and again, He halts His movement when He encounters suffering:
• He stops for the blind man others silence
• He stops for the woman no one should touch
• He stops at graves
• He stops in places everyone else avoids
Jesus does not pass by pain—He moves toward it.
And nowhere is that clearer than at the cross.
The cross is God’s answer to the question of Lamentations—not spoken, but embodied.
When humanity asks,
“Does this mean nothing to You?”
God answers—not with words—but by staying.
Staying with us.
Staying in suffering.
Staying even when it costs Him everything.
--- THE HEART THAT DID NOT GO NUMB
Here is the quiet miracle of the gospel.
Jesus does not numb Himself to the world’s pain.
He does not detach.
He does not harden.
Instead, He carries it.
He weeps.
He groans.
He bleeds.
And in doing so, He reveals something essential about God:
God’s heart does not go numb.
Not to Jerusalem’s ruins.
Not to human cruelty.
Not to our exhaustion.
Not even to our tendency to pass by.
Which means this sermon does not end by telling us to feel more.
It ends by reminding us who we belong to.
--- WHY WE CARE—AND WHEN WE FAIL TO
If we are honest, there are days when we do pass by.
Days when the pain is too much.
Days when the heart grows tired.
The good news is not that we never fail.
The good news is that Christ never does.
And when our love falters,
His does not.
When our compassion grows thin,
His remains deep.
When our hearts go numb,
His remains open.
So we do not care in order to become children of God.
We care because we already are.
And even when we cannot carry the world’s pain,
we trust the One who has already carried it for us.
--- A FINAL WORD
So when the cry rises again—
“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?”
The Christian answer is not bravado.
It is not performance.
It is not guilt.
It is confession and hope:
“It is something to me—because it was something to Him.
I love, because He first loved me.
I stop, because He did not pass me by.”
And that is enough to begin again.
--- Appeal
Lord, keep our hearts alive.
When the pain feels too heavy and our love grows thin, help us not to pass by.
Teach us to stay—present, honest, and open—trusting the Christ who stayed with us.
--- Prayer
God of mercy,
We confess that there are moments when our hearts grow tired and our compassion feels distant.
Thank You for meeting us not with scolding, but with presence.
When we cannot carry the weight of this world, remind us that You already have.
Teach us to love because we are loved,
to stop because You did not pass us by,
and to begin again in Your grace.
Amen.
