As we come to the end of chapter 3 the tone of the verses changes. There is initially a sense of relief – the chapter begins to read like some of the Psalms where the poet is praising God for rescuing them.
Those who were my enemies without cause
hunted me like a bird.
53 They tried to end my life in a pit
and threw stones at me;
54 the waters closed over my head,
and I thought I was about to perish.55 I called on your name, Lord,
Lamentations 3:52-57
from the depths of the pit.
56 You heard my plea: “Do not close your ears
to my cry for relief.”
57 You came near when I called you,
and you said, “Do not fear.”
From a poem of unremitting bleakness this comes as a reminder that the expected pattern of life for the believer is that God will, eventually, come through. God will draw near, and his word is always “Do not fear.” This comes a lot in the Bible, and while it does not come 365 times (or even 366 – so please don’t put that statistic in a sermon or talk), it is always a word for today. Always something to breathe into our lives. God is near, and he says “Do not fear.”
So many things cause us to fear. But God is always stronger, always bigger, and always ultimately victorious – even if we are sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem surrounded by enemies with no human cause for hope, and no evidence that God is actually with us.
That is the great reassurance of these verses – but then their note jars.
58 You, Lord, took up my case;
you redeemed my life.
59 Lord, you have seen the wrong done to me.
Uphold my cause!
60 You have seen the depth of their vengeance,
all their plots against me.61 Lord, you have heard their insults,
all their plots against me—
62 what my enemies whisper and mutter
against me all day long.
63 Look at them! Sitting or standing,
they mock me in their songs.64 Pay them back what they deserve, Lord,
for what their hands have done.
65 Put a veil over their hearts,
and may your curse be on them!
66 Pursue them in anger and destroy them
from under the heavens of the Lord.
Here this man who has seen sorrow turns to God in anger and calls on him to curse his enemies. We read these words as believers in the Jesus who forgave his crucifiers. And so we wonder what place these words have in our bibles – and what use do we make of them.
It is easy to feel superior to the Lamenter when we are not suffering. Easy to sit in comfortable ease and mentally rebuke them. And yet we know that when we suffer, and especially when we suffer at the hands of abusers we feel anger. That anger is not wholly wrong – we should feel anger at injustice, and that anger is also inevitable. The question becomes what we do that anger?
To follow the anger and take revenge ourselves is forbidden – as believers in the Christ who forgave from a cross we are not to take revenge. Yet if we deny the anger and pretend it is not there, it is likely to erupt at some other time and place, catching us unawares – and probably harming those closest to us.
We need a safe place to go to express that anger, a place where we can say what we feel, perhaps knowing it is not quite right, but knowing that the person will hear us, and take the appropriate action at the appropriate time.
It is the wonder of the believer in the God of Lamentations, and the God of the Psalms that we can come to our God, the one who created the universe, and fling our arms around him so to speak. We can pummel him, shout and rant at him, call on him to take action, call on him to take the revenge we long to take until we finally fall still as he holds us and quiets us with his love.
We have these kinds of prayers in the Bible as an example to us of the kind of thing we can say to God. The alternative is to stand aloof, like a child deeply unhappy with something, but who will not come to his parents to express that unhappiness. We can bury deep within us the trauma, we can pretend we have forgiven and that all is well with the world. But if we do not deal with the anger it will explode somewhere else at some other time, and it will not be pretty.
So right now, if there is anger in us, if we are smarting and hurting, the first place to go is God. We are likely also to need to talk to someone wiser than us, to help us process it all, to make sure that our speech to God is not also pretence. But sooner or later we need to go to God and be willing to pour out our hearts to him – knowing that the Psalms and Lamentations remind us that it is OK (as John Goldingay points out in To The Usual Suspects) to say pretty much anything to God.
Joshua's Tree Rooted 