A little book known as Lamentations, written in Judah about 586 BC by one (the Massoretic Text does not name the author and places it among the writings, after Ecclesiastes and before Esther, while LXX names Jeremiah), left behind after the fall of Jerusalem, is a touching response to the devastation witnessed by the author. Even R. K. Harrison, an evangelical scholar, says evidence for authorship is not strong one way or the other. He leans toward non-Jeremiah, saying a man who witnessed the fall of Jerusalem wrote it. Some ancient traditions attribute the book to Jeremiah (“the weeping prophet”), based partly on a misunderstanding of II Chronicles 35:25. A NET note on 1:1 states: “The LXX [Greek] and Vulgate [Latin] … include a preface that is lacking in the MT [the Hebrew Masoretic Text]: ‘And it came to pass after Israel had been taken captive and Jerusalem had been laid waste, Jeremiah sat weeping and lamented this lament over Jerusalem, and said …’” But for a number of reasons, including style and the fact that Jeremiah had been taken to Egypt after the fall of Jerusalem (see Jeremiah 43), it is doubtful that Jeremiah himself wrote Lamentations. Furthermore, in the Hebrew Bible, Lamentations is not among the Prophets, but among the Writings, where it is one of the five scrolls (megilloth, the plural of megillah): Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther.
The book is a series of poetic, gut-wrenching laments which bewail/grieve over the devastation of Zion/Jerusalem/Judah by the Babylonians (586 b.c. ) and their subsequent exile. There is plenty to wail over: During both the year-and-a-half siege before the walls of Jerusalem were breached, as well as during the continuing post-destruction lack of food, starvation reached the point that some resorted to cannibalism. The Babylonians imprisoned their last king, Zedekiah in exile after having witnessed the execution of his sons. God’s temple had been desecrated and destroyed. The Babylonians left holy city, Jerusalem/Zion, in ruins. Most of the people were taken off into exile where many were required to do forced labor. Nothing they valued remained.
Delbert R. Hillers (Anchor Bible) says its meaning and purpose is to express the grief and horror of having witnessed the destruction of every external thing that gave assurance of the presence of God. It is an eloquent expression of grief. It also is a confession of sin, fully in line with the prophetic judgment of why this happened. The central chapter relates a man who clings to the mercy of God, saying that suffering does not have the final word. The book is also a confession of sin, fully in line with the above prophetic view of what happened. The prophets of Israel had foretold with unmistakable charity the destruction of the nation, and divine punishment for the iniquity of the ancestors was the well-known, inescapable darker side of the covenant with God. What had come upon them was nothing less than the day of the Lord, the day of the wrath of the Lord. Scholars disagree as to exactly what the Israelite conception of the day of the Lord was at various times. This book is notable in that it can refer to the day of the wrath of the Lord as past. The awful events of the siege and fall were already a decisive outpouring of the wrath of the Lord, a judgment day.
In terms of literary style, all five poems have connection with the Hebrew alphabet. Chapters 1 and 2 have each stanza consisting of three lines, with each stanza beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. Chapter 4 is similar, except that each stanza has two lines. Chapter 3 has each stanza with three lines, but this time each line of the stanza begins with the proper letter. Chapter 5 is not an acrostic poem, but it does have twenty-two lines, the precise number of letters in the alphabet.
Although both Kings and Chronicles relate facts related to the Fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC, this text relates what those facts meant to the people left behind. It expresses the horror at the destruction of every external thing that gave assurance of the presence of God. The book served the survivors of the catastrophe in the first place as an expression of the almost inexpressible horror and grief they felt. Human beings often best deal with such calamity by facing it directly, by finding some form of words to order and articulate their experience.
Lamentations has quite a few parallels to other laments in the Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature of the period. See many Psalms, such as 13, 44, and Psalm 79 (in this issue of Homiletics). The book of Job has similar themes. Lamentations follows a funeral-song dirge pattern, in terms of both the cadence of its verses and thematic content.
Jesus himself lamented over Jerusalem (anticipating the upcoming loss of city and temple in a.d. 70 to the Romans): “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate.”
Lamentations 1 begins with “How (eykah),” which is the title in the Hebrew Bible. The theme is the anguish of Zion. The LXX and Vulgate have a preface that makes it clear Jeremiah offers the laments contained here. As a textual note, before 1:1, LXX and Vulgate have this preface: "And it came to pass after Israel had been taken captive and Jerusalem had been laid waste, Jeremiah sat weeping and lamented this lament over Jerusalem, and said ..." This chapter is an impressive poetic description of the desolation of the city of God. It has a movement from external, objective, third-person view to an internal subjective first person view.
Lamentations 1:1-6 is part of a segment that continues to verse 11, expressing the anguish of Zion, as seen from without. Psalms can refer to Zion in an ideal way, but Jeremiah is seeing its reality in his day. 1How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! Here is one image of her loneliness. How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! Psalm 48:2 refers to Zion ideally as the city of our God as the holy mountain of God, beautiful in elevation, and the joy of all the earth. Here is a second image of her loneliness. She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal. Psalm 48:2 refers to Mount Zion ideally as the city of the great King. The imagery shifts to that of a faithless woman. 2 She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies. 3 Judah has gone into exile with suffering and hard servitude; she lives now among the nations, and finds no resting place; her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress. 4 The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to the festivals; all her gates are desolate, her priests groan; her young girls grieve, and her lot is bitter. Jerusalem, where the religious festivals of the people of God occurred, no longer hosts festivals. 5 Her foes have become the masters, her enemies prosper, because the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions. Sin has consequences. Behind the pagan victory over Judah is the judgment of God. The idea is that the actual catastrophe of exile came after a prolonged period of inglorious trouble and toil. The fate of Jerusalem is the fulfillment of a threat associated with the covenant. Zion's sin is rebellion. Her children have gone away, captives before the foe. 6 From daughter Zion has departed all her majesty. Her princes have become like stags that find no pasture; they fled without strength before the pursuer. The enemies of Judah have driven its leadership to collapse. In 1:7, Jerusalem remembers the precious things that were hers in days of old. In verse 11, the poet identifies with Zion fully.
Life is more like the night than many of us want to admit.[1] The experience of desolation, groaning, grieving, and bitterness weaves itself into the fabric of human life. Suffering is not an experience reserved for the poor or oppressed. Living involves suffering. Sometimes, this suffering leads us toward darkness, as if our loneliness and isolation will last forever.
We cannot wish away such experiences. We cannot wave a magic wand and demand that they leave us. Rather, we need to face them honestly. The intensity of evil and suffering in the world confronts the believer with a profound matter of faith. How can we continue to believe when children still suffer and die in war and famine?
Although I grant the challenge to faith, suffering and evil in the world raise another question. How do we hold on amid so much evil and suffering? Faith, hope, and love give me the strength to confront evil and suffering. Rather than allowing darkness to overwhelm me, faith, hope and love moves me beyond my experience and toward a future I do not yet fully see or experience. Yet, that future is in the hands of God, who loves us more than we can ever know. Some will ask how I can continue to believe amid so much suffering and evil in the world. I ask how one can continue to live meaningfully and with reasonable happiness without believing.
We must be honest about the dark side of life, about the possibility of pain, of unknowing and tragedy. Christians do not deny that life has its dark side. Yet, in times of tragedy, we believe that God hears our cry, that God cares, and that God grieves with us. Portions of Scripture, like some of the psalms of lament and the book of Lamentations, help us to express our grief and give our grief over to God, that our grief might be assuaged and redeemed.
“She weeps bitterly in the night.” The reference here is to the city of Jerusalem. Babylon has devastated Jerusalem and taken away its leaders. The majestic temple built by Solomon is gone. The remaining descendants of David have either died or been brought to Babylon. Everything has changed. “She weeps bitterly in the night.”
I do not think the church does well during darkness. Mary Ward Brown wrote an article The Atlantic Monthly in 1991. She wrote that Elizabeth's husband had died a horrible, painful death after a lengthy illness. And when he died, it was as if a light had gone out in her soul, so deep and dark was her grief. She wondered why such a good man had to suffer like that. Yet, some Christian friends made her experience of grief worse. She longs to climb out of her grief and darkness, yet she hides from these Christians. Her comment went like this:
They refuse to look on the dark side of things, and they want her to blink it away, too. If she can smile in the face of loss, grief, and death, so can they. They're like children in a fairy tale, singing songs, holding hands. Never mind the dark wood, the wolves and witches. Or birds that eat up the bread crumbs. [2]
There is a lot of darkness in the Bible, more than in a church on Sunday morning. Friend Job, in utter despair, mentions darkness three dozen times in his howling lament. Darkness is like creation reversed. Remember, before God got busy with the world, "the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep" (Gen 1:2). The disciples are on the sea in a storm one night when they cry out to Jesus on the waves, "Lord, save us! We are perishing!" (Mt 8:25). And when Jesus' twelve best friends fled when the soldiers came to seize Jesus, it was night. Could the healing and fullness of life we need, is something we cannot have until we can face the night?
How does one keep the faith through grim times? Does one? How can we continually claim vitality and new life on our faith journey as we face huge life-changing events like the news of a lover's breast cancer, or a child held up and robbed on the way home from school, or the death of a husband after 50 years of marriage. How does one live alone in a house year after year without sharing an intimate life? How do we deal with a job promotion, or demotion, what about sudden wealth? - for some of us, as difficult to cope with as poverty. The list of difficult choices and life issues goes on and on and on. How do we find faith in a world where a 6-year-old brings a gun to school and kills his little classmate and he does not even realize the terrible consequence of his actions? A world where millions are made homeless after a flood, a world where there are devastating diseases like AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer's Disease? Life is so fragile.
Is the phrase "Indifferent Christian" an oxymoron? Christians, in fact, can do nothing but be in relation with those who are around them, whether a carjacking victim, the visitor at church, the homebound neighbor up the street, one's aged parents, one's wayward children, longtime friend or short-term acquaintance. To touch and stay in touch is Christian behavior. Touching is the soul-river that runs it -- through our Christ-community of faith.
A conductor from Eastern Europe was being interviewed after having spent years in isolation because of his political views. After the usual series of political and personal questions, the reporter took a surprising turn: "What in your opinion is the most beautiful piece of music ever written?" The maestro thought for a while and did not answer. "While you were held in isolation," the reporter pressed further, "what did you want most to hear? What music would you at that moment have thought the most beautiful to hear?" The maestro perked up: "In the whole world?" "Yes, in the whole world," the reporter replied. "In all the world," the conductor said with tears in his eyes, "the most beautiful music is the sound of another voice." Hell does not mean other people, as Sartre said it did in his play “No Exit.” Rather, hell means being removed from other people, being thrown out of a community.
In the familiar story of Adam and Eve, did you ever stop and notice just when the Serpent works on seducing Adam and Eve? It is when they were separate, apart from each other, not in direct relationship. The Serpent employed the first example we have of the divide and conquer technique. The snake in the grass is still at work. Thirty million Americans (one out of three church members) join a church and then drop out. Why? Charles Arn did a study of why United Methodists left. He found that the primary reason the majority (75 percent) left had nothing to do with theology. It was relational. People just did not feel wanted and did not bond to the community. How does one receive faith? Through others! How does one receive strength for the journey? Through others! How does one find healing from the wounds along the way? Through others!
If one touches your faith, is it real?
--When touched by another's suffering, do you weep?
--When touched by another's joy, do you laugh?
--When touched by another's pain, do you ache?
--When touched by another's warmth, are you comforted?
--When touched by another's coldness, are you chilled?
--When touched by another's sorrow, do you mourn?
--When touched by another's love, do you multiply that love and send it on?
Jesus promised perfect freedom comes not to those who do as they please, but to those who love as they should. What is it God wants from us? Does God want us to think the right thoughts? Does God want us to do the right things? Or does God want us to be in the right relationships -- with God, with each other, with ourselves, with creation -- relationships based on truth and trust and touch? Any religion that announces God is Love is about relationships! It is the relationships that produce the right thoughts and right actions.
God makes us to stare into the abyss, into the darkness, to admit to the dark places in our world where there is more chaos than creation, made by a church that is not often too truthful, made to be honest about those corners of our own souls where there is darkness too deep to mention.
Throughout the Bible, light is the quality of God. God is light "and in him there is no darkness at all" (1 Jn 1:5) says John. Light is what God did when God began pushing back the dark chaos at creation. So night ought to be the one place where one would not expect to find God, for has it not been said, God is light?
Nevertheless, if God is only God of the day, then God cannot be our God, for as we have said, there is much darkness in us.
Teach us, O loving God, to be honest about the darkness, to be courageous in calling out to you when it grows dark in our lives, then to be patient in waiting for the coming of the dawn. Amen.
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