Lamentations I

A while ago I posted on the concept of Lament, intended as a introduction to a series on Lamentations. In that introduction I explored the wider concept of lament, and in this post I will focus more specifically on the book of Lamentations itself.

Reading Lamentations is not necessarily immediately straightforward. It is not a book that immediately grabs the comfortable modern western reader. It is five chapters of lament, of expressing distress and anguish directly to God. We are not used to this kind of writing – our songs focus on celebration, not mourning.

Lamentations may also puzzle us because it is expressing distress and anguish at an event that God has explicitly warned people will happen. This event is the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian empire under Nebuchadnezzar (read the end of 2 Kings). Jeremiah warned of this event multiple times in his prophesying.

My natural (flawed) reaction to this is simply to think: why is the writer of Lamentations spending so much time lamenting and mourning and questioning God over something that God has already said would happen as a punishment for Israel’s sin?

Part of my answer to myself is to reflect on the fact that there are different degrees of culpability in the fall of Jerusalem. The people of Jerusalem and Judah were a mixed group of people, and some of them were faithful to Yahweh. Yet he did not save them out of the destruction of the city.

That partial answer helps me see that the writer is able to lament the destruction of the city even while it was announced ahead of time as God’s punishment on evil. Helpful as such a partial answer might be for me though it is not something that the Bible makes very much of – it is not used as a reason for protest in the Bible.

Another aspect of the fall of Jerusalem that leads to lament in scripture is the reality that God’s punishment on Jerusalem came about through the evil actions of evil men – and it is therefore right to cry out to God in protest at this wicked event. This is the paradox that appalls Habakkuk. A righteous God uses wicked men to accomplish his purposes. This is an, at times, frankly bewildering reality of scripture, and yet if we deny the reality that God does this we will struggle to appreciate the cross.

Why did God do this? And how can a good God do this? I bring a lot of questions in my mind and heart to a text like this. And as we do that it is important to allow this text to push back at my mind and heart. It may be that my assumptions about what God does and does not do need to be tested.

For in our world there is so much material for lament today. There is obviously the huge global public health crisis that is Covid-19. There is the uncovering of so much ugliness and sin in our public lives. That sin however is not confined to the world, it is found in the church as well. The past year seems to have seen scandal follow scandal. Individuals have been exposed as frauds or bullies. The church as a whole has been exposed as far too blind to the lure of the gifted speaker that we are ready to overlook other parts of their character, and speak evil of those who will not overlook those parts.

We have allowed such sins to go on in our midst, and simultaneously we find that our credibility and position is weakened in society at large. And so we come back to God with our heartache and questions over what God is allowing in our world and in our churches.

We also come back to Lamentations as those who have played our part, either by active participation, or, more often, by silent complicity, in the abuse of others (I was struck by Chris Wright making this point in his BST commentary on Lamentations). We have been like the Babylonians destroying Jerusalem.

Throughout the history of the Christian church that has been all too often literally the case in appalling antisemitism. But even if we are free from such obvious wickedness we have often still allowed wrong doing to go unchallenged. Perhaps those of us who are men have stood apart from direct wrong behaviour against women, but failed to challenge attitudes, words and actions that treat women as objects.

Reading Lamentations reminds us of the consequences of treating other people as something less than fearfully and wonderfully made bearers of God’s image. Not only does it give us words to lament our own tragedies, it should give us words that enable us to imagine the world of the abused, the world of the victim, and the world of the sufferer.

It is therefore a vital book for us to read and get to grips with in, a book full of resources to help us navigate the disorientating world in which we find ourselves at this moment in history and in church history.

In order for us to get the help we need from Lamentations, we need to recognise and understand its perspective and to do that we need to understand its structure. Lamentations is five chapters of someone pouring out their heart to God – yet pouring out their heart in a structured way. Each chapter has 22 stanzas (in chapter 1-3 these have three lines in each stanza). In chapter 1-4 each stanza begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In chapter 3 each of the lines within the stanza even begin with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet (and so each line gets its own English verse). In the final chapter the pattern is not followed – although there are still 22 stanzas.

There is a structure and a pattern to the poets grief. In this book we have an A-Z of lament, there is something comprehensive about this. Not that it exhausts everything that can be said, but its structure of completeness means that it somehow represents a full expression of the poets grief. Nothing is held back from God.

Before looking at Lamentations 1 why not pause to write your own lament to God? Choose a situation which weighs heavily on your heart. Write down what you are feeling about it. Include all the questions it raises about God and his work in your mind and heart. Try some method of structuring it – perhaps an acrostic like the poet, perhaps rhyme or rhythm.