Joel opens with a question no one can answer. 2"Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers?" Every elder in the gathered crowd searches memory and comes up empty. Whatever this is has never happened before, and Joel wants it told to children not yet born.
What happened is named in a sentence built on repetition. 4"What the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten." Four Hebrew words for locust, or four stages of one devastation, and it hardly matters which. Nothing anyone saved from the first wave survived the second, and nothing that survived the second survived the third.
Joel calls one group after another to grieve, each for a loss particular to them. The drunkards, jolted sober because the wine is cut off. The land, told to lament 8"like a virgin wearing sackcloth for the bridegroom of her youth," the grief of a woman promised a future that was taken before it began. The farmers, ashamed at fields stripped bare. And the priests most of all, ordered to spend the night in sackcloth, because the grain and drink offerings that have sustained Israel's worship since the wilderness have stopped. Every sector of society loses something different, and Joel names each.
All of that grief funnels into one command: 14"Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly." Gather the elders and all the people to the house of the LORD, and 14"cry out to the LORD." Everyone, together, in the place built for this kind of crying out.
Then comes the line that gives the book its center of gravity: 15"as destruction from the Almighty it comes." In Hebrew the word for destruction and the word for Almighty sound almost identical, a deliberate echo that rings like a warning bell twice. Joel is doing something no one expected. The Day of the LORD was supposed to be the day Israel's enemies got what was coming. Here Joel says plainly that this plague is a preview of that same day, and it falls on God's own people first.
Only at the very end does Joel speak to God directly. 19"To you, O LORD, I call." Every verse before this described the disaster or called others to respond. This is the first time the prophet turns and addresses God face to face, and what follows is startling. He gives his lament's final image to the animals: 20"Even the beasts of the field pant for you because the water brooks are dried up." Cattle groaning in empty pastures, all of it given voice, as though the whole created order were joining the cry the priests had been told to raise.
Joel treats creation's suffering as grief worth naming in his own prayer, as Paul will say that the whole creation groans while it waits for redemption (Romans 8:22).
Ask what wave has hit you before the last one finished, and whom you might gather to cry out with you.
Prayer
Father, we have known our own versions of wave after wave, one loss arriving before the last had finished its damage. Thank you that you hear the cry of the land itself. Where we have grown too used to disaster to call it unprecedented, wake us as this plague woke Joel's nation. Teach us to gather and to cry out together. In Jesus' name, amen.