From Bride to Scream — and Back Again

On Jeremiah, broken relationships, and the God who takes the cost

I want to tell you about a love poem that goes wrong.

It starts beautifully. God is speaking through the prophet Jeremiah, and the voice is tender, almost nostalgic — the way someone talks about the early days of a relationship before things got complicated. I remember the devotion of your youth, God says to Israel, your love as a bride, how you followed me into the wilderness (Jeremiah 2:2). There's warmth in it. There's longing. You can almost see the couple packing their bags and leaving behind everything familiar, doing the thing that everyone older and wiser told them not to do, because they were so in love they didn't care.

And then five verses later, the same voice: What wrong did your ancestors find in me? Why did they go so far from me?

That is not a theological proposition. That is a devastated person asking the question that every person who has ever been left has asked: What did I do wrong? What did you find in me that wasn't enough?

We are in Lent. And I want to suggest to you that Lent begins right here — not with self-improvement goals or giving up chocolate, but with sitting inside that question. Because if we're honest, most of us are standing on one side of it or the other.

The Arc of a Marriage That Falls Apart

Chapter 2 of Jeremiah contains 27 rhetorical questions. I want you to feel the weight of that number. Twenty-seven. God, through Jeremiah, cannot stop asking. The questions cycle between grief and rage, between anguished confusion and devastating accusation. What did I do? Why did you leave? Do you not see what this has cost you?

And then the metaphor takes a turn that makes modern readers uncomfortable, because it should. God reaches for the language of a marriage gone violently wrong. Israel is compared to a wild animal in heat. The nation is called a prostitute. The imagery is sexually degrading, and I don't think we serve the text by glossing over it or explaining it away. The discomfort is the point — not because the language is good, but because we need to understand what it's doing and where it came from.

The Old Testament scholar Kathleen O'Connor has spent her career reading the prophets through the lens of trauma and disaster, and she names something important here. On one hand, Jeremiah is making a remarkable literary choice for his era. He is saying: if you want to understand what has happened to this nation, you need to listen to women — to the grief of a bride, the scream of a woman in labor, the vulnerability of bodies that have been violated. In a world where women's suffering was largely invisible, Jeremiah is insisting it be seen and heard.

On the other hand, Dr. O'Connor is unflinching: Jeremiah also uses women as symbols of wickedness. He lists the actual culprits plainly enough in chapter 2 — the priests who forgot God, the lawyers who didn't know the Torah, the rulers who made corrupt political alliances, the prophets who spoke for foreign gods. These are the decisions of male elites that collapsed the nation. But the metaphor feminizes all of it. The blame lands on a woman's body. The husband accuses. The husband exposes. The husband, as you go deeper into the text, abuses.

"The metaphor doesn't disappear — but what happens in it is completely inverted."

We hold all of that. We don't skip past it. Because the Bible isn't done with this metaphor yet. And neither is God.

Shuv: The Word That Changes Everything

There's a Hebrew word that appears over and over in Jeremiah chapter 3. The word is shuv (שׁוּב). It means to turn — and crucially, it can mean turning in either direction. You can shuv away from God. You can also shuv back toward God. The capacity for departure and the capacity for return live inside the same word, the same motion, the same person.

And right in the center of all that accusation — the degrading imagery, the multigenerational blame, the escalating pursuit and withdrawal — right in the middle of Jeremiah 3, verse 12, the whole thing pivots: Return, faithless Israel, says the Lord. I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful. I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt.

That's it. That's the condition. Not: fix what you broke. Not: earn your way back. Not: explain yourself. Just: turn around and acknowledge it.

The same turning that took you away from home can bring you back home.

I think about the family systems work we've done as a congregation — the pursuer and the withdrawer, the cycle where one person's pursuit intensifies the other person's retreat until both of them are exhausted and far from each other. God in this passage is the relentless pursuer. Israel keeps saying we will not come to you anymore (Jeremiah 2:31). And God keeps asking questions. And Israel keeps leaving. And God pursues harder.

It is not a healthy dynamic. But it is a real one. And if you've ever been in a relationship that felt that way — if you've ever been the one who couldn't stop asking, or the one who couldn't stop leaving — you know that the way out is never more pursuit and more withdrawal. The way out is someone turning.

What Happens to the Metaphor in Ephesians

Now I want to take you somewhere that might surprise you. Paul, writing to the church at Ephesus, reaches for the same marriage metaphor. Husbands, he says, love your wives as Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25). And the Greek word he uses for what Christ does for his bride is paradidomi — the same word used when Judas hands Jesus over to the authorities to be crucified. It means to deliver someone unto another's power. To give yourself over completely.

In Jeremiah, the husband accuses. In Ephesians, the husband paradidomis. He hands himself over. He takes the cost onto himself rather than putting it on the one he loves.

That is not a small shift. That is the entire trajectory of the metaphor reversing direction. * "The cost moves. In Jeremiah, it falls on the unfaithful partner. In Ephesians, it falls on the faithful one."*

In Jeremiah, the wife is punished for her unfaithfulness. In Ephesians, the husband dies for his bride. And I think we need to let that land before we rush past it. God, in the fullness of the story, does not do what God had every apparent right to do. God absorbs the cost. God takes the punishment. The husband doesn't punish the bride. The husband dies for the bride.

And I'll say what I said on Sunday, because I believe it: there is nothing more queer than this. We have a room full of men and women and non-binary people, all of us called the bride of a Jesus who has two dads, who may not have all the chromosomes we assume, who refers to himself not as aner — the Greek word for adult male — but as anthropos, the human being. The God who gives birth to new life, because how else are we born again if the Spirit is not a birthing person?

The gender of this God has never been what we were told it was. The family God is building has never looked like what we expected.

The Family Built from Fragments

Here is the part of Jeremiah that doesn't get preached enough. After the pursuit. After the accusations. After the nation has been destroyed and the people have been exiled. After chapter after chapter of grief and rage and unanswered questions. Jeremiah 3:14 says this: Return, O faithless children, says the Lord, for I am your husband. I will take you, one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion. One from a city. Two from a family. Not the old household restored. Not the shattered pot glued back together so it looks like it used to. Not a return to what was. Something new. Fragments gathered from the ruins of multiple broken families, brought together into something that has never existed before.

"That's not the consolation prize. That's the plan. It's what God always does — making new things out of the shattered things."

I look at our congregation and I see exactly this. The pandemic. The merger. The people who left. The people who stayed. The people who found us in the rubble of something else. What sits in this room is not an original family. It is pieces — one from here, two from there — gathered and held together not by nostalgia for something that used to exist, but by a God who specializes in building things that have never been built before.

What Lent Actually Is

So here is what I want to leave you with as we move through this season together.

Lent is not a dramatic moment. It is not a crisis conversion or a single decision that changes everything. It is the daily practice of noticing which direction you are facing — and being willing to turn. Some of us have turned away from God, from community, from the version of ourselves that was tender enough to actually feel things. I don't say that as an accusation. I say it because I've done it. We all do it. We harden to protect ourselves from the political climate, from grief, from the exhaustion of caring about things that keep getting harder to care about. The heart calcifies. It's understandable.

But a heart that hardens to protect itself becomes the very thing that shatters at the next blow.

And some of us are tired from turning. We've been shuv-ing, turning back Sunday after Sunday and Monday through Saturday, and we're not sure what we're turning toward anymore. When we think of God, we think of the accusing God — the one with 27 questions and a degrading metaphor and an endless capacity to pursue and demand.

But the God you are turning toward is not the worst version of Jeremiah's metaphor. The God you are turning toward is the one who paradidomis — who hands themselves over, not in punishment, but in love. The cost is not on you. The cost has been absorbed. What is being asked of you is not perfection or repair. It's just: turn around. Acknowledge it. Face the right direction. And keep turning. Every day, if you have to. ** That's what Lent is. That's what this community is — one from a city, two from a family, gathered and turning together.**