Lamentations for Today: Part One[1]
Reed
Lessing
(Concordia University St. Paul, Minnesota)
Abstract: The article explores the relevance of the biblical book of Lamentations in modern Christian life. It highlights the book s raw portrayal of grief, despair, and suffering following Jerusalem s destruction, emphasizing its universal resonance with human pain and loss. Despite its brutal imagery and accusations against God, Lamentations offers a pathway to spiritual healing by encouraging honest expressions of sorrow and lament. The text challenges the tendency in Western culture and Christian worship to suppress grief in favor of positivity, arguing that lamenting is essential for emotional and spiritual authenticity. By rejecting Lamentations, believers risk losing the ability to confront injustice, express vulnerability, and engage deeply with God during times of suffering. The article underscores the importance of lament as a way to reconnect with God, address personal and communal wounds, and navigate life s tragedies. It advocates for embracing Lamentations as a tool for healing, reflection, and prayer, asserting that its timeless themes of anguish and hope remain profoundly relevant in a world marked by disasters and loss. Ultimately, Lamentations invites believers to honor their pain, confront reality, and seek God s mercy amidst life s darkest moments.
Within
the last one-hundred and fifty years, the world has witnessed The war to end
all wars, World War Two, the Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden, Stalin s
purges, the Chinese cultural revolution, the killings fields of the Khmer
Rouge, Rwanda, 9/11. The point? Life can be hell. Sometimes, it crushes our
hearts. So why study Lamentations an ancient book that mourns one more
disaster? Why increase our sadness by throwing ourselves into poetry filled
with mourning and misery? When offered the opportunity, most Christians take a
pass. Alternatively, if they do read Lamentations, it is probably because they are
systematically reading the Bible cover to cover. They have to read Lamentations
to get to the next book, Ezekiel.
How lonely sits
the city once full of people" (Lam 1:1a). "Renew our days as of
old unless you have completely rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry
with us" (Lam 5:21 22). The book of Lamentations begins and ends with
sorrow and deep sadness.
Most of the
baptized hear snippets from Lamentations, especially 3:22 23. After that, a quick
read of the book might prompt the question, Why is this in the Bible?
Todd Linafelt aptly writes, A more relentlessly brutal piece of writing is
scarcely imaginable. [2] Some react vehemently. For instance, in
1995, Naomi Seidman composed a short story titled "Burning the Book of
Lamentations."[3]
The Hebrew Bible titles
Lamentations אֵיכָ֣ה,
How could it be? after the first word in the book. The Babylonian Talmud (b.
B. Bat. 14b 15a) calls it q n t, laments. Ancient Jews also termed it mĕgillat
q n t, "a scroll of laments" (y. Shab. 16:15c), as well as sēper
q n t, a book of laments (b. Ḥag. 8b). The LXX calls it ΘΡΗΝΟΙ, Dirges, while the
Vulgate offers this title, threni id est lamentations Jeremias prophetiae, Dirges,
that is, laments of Jeremiah the prophet. Martin Luther simply labeled it Klagelider,
Dirges/Laments.
Israel s long
history from Genesis to 2 Kings culminated in total disaster. Called ti bĕ āb by Jews for centuries
(Mishnah Ta an. 4:6), it all appeared to be a complete and irrevocable end.
The latter appears
mild when we compare the book of Lamentations with Jeremiah's protests (Jer
11:18 12:6; 15:10 21; 17:14 18; 18:18 23; 20:7 13). While Jeremiah complains
that Yahweh has led him "like a lamb to the slaughter" (Jer 11:19) or
is a "deceitful brook" (Jer 15:18), he does not blame God for
directly attacking him. However, in Lamentations, Daughter Zion (e.g., Lam
1:11c 16; 2:4a-b, 5a) and Jeremiah (e.g., Lam 3:1 18) accuse Yahweh of becoming
their adversary. Only the book of Job matches this bitterness and rancor.
Lamentations
expresses misery, sadness, anguish, heartache, darkness, agony, hurt,
affliction, tribulation, calamity, torment, isolation, wretchedness,
misfortune, and unmitigated pain. The multitude of dead bodies, fractured
bones, and broken spirits that fill the lines of this poetry attest to the
horrific outcome of God s attack. [4]
Baylon ripped apart
Jerusalem s walls, gates, citadels and most importantly, the city s temple (Lam
2:1 9). Enemy soldiers decimated the nation s army (Lam 1:15a), who ran for
their lives (Lam 1:6b-c). Political and religious leaders were either dead (Lam
1:15b-c), exiled (Lam 1:3a), starving to death (Lam 1:11a), or drowning in
sorrow (Lam 2:10). Survivors huddled together broken and hopeless. Not so
fortunate others were executed (Lam 5:12). Normal life, including judicial and
economic processes, ceased, ushering in suffering and starvation (Lam 2:12, 20;
4:2 10; 5:2, 4 6). Access to life s basic needs evaporated (Lam 5:2, 4). The
upshot? Jerusalem became like a slave (Lam 1:1c); her citizens felt like filth
and garbage (Lam 3:45). The empire s military force reduced everything to dust.
A thick veil of
darkness covered the landscape. Babylon negated, voided, and destroyed
everything. Death hovered around every corner. The future was blank. There was
no future. W.F. Dobbs-Allsopp maintains,
These poems
constitute some of the Bible s most violent and brutal pieces of writing as
well, as they emerge, both literally and figuratively, out of the ashes and
ruins of Jerusalem and are filled with horrifyingly dark and grizzly images of
raw human pain and suffering.[5]
And yet! In 1923,
Thomas Chisholm wrote the hymn "Great Is Thy Faithfulness." Little
did he know that, after William Runyan set the words to music, it would find
its way into worship services and in time be a staple in Christian hymnals. The
title comes directly from Lamentations 3:23, a verse that bursts forth with
hope.
Despite everything,
the book of Lamentations hangs on sometimes by a thread to God s faithfulness.
The small trickle of prayers (e.g., Lam 1:9c; 1:11a; 2:20 22) becomes a steady
stream (Lam 3:40 47). It then turns into a rushing river in chapter five, where
the community s cries and protests, laments and longings, are brought to Yahweh,
whose steadfast love endures forever. This prayer places the book s tears and
heavy sighs into God s hands. It is within the context of unspeakable despair
that Lam 3:23 dares to assert, Great is thy faithfulness.
God also invites us
to sing and raise our voices defiantly when it is the most difficult.[6] To join the choir with these lyrics,
"Great is Thy faithfulness. Morning by morning, new mercies I see."
Is
there a place for the book of Lamentations in the Christian life? Most believers
say no. Christ fulfills Old Testament promises. It is time to rejoice, be glad,
and weep no more. Consider Paul. The apostle exhorts us with upbeat
expressions. "Rejoice in the Lord!" (Phil 4:4) "We are more than
conquerors through him who loved us" (Rom 8:37). "Give thanks in all
circumstances" (1 Thess 5:18). "We boast in our suffering" (Rom
5:3). Why become lost in defeat when we can live in victory? Why shed a tear?
If we trust God enough and believe in his promises wholeheartedly, everything
will turn out to be sunshine and roses. Is it not our duty to thank, praise,
serve, and obey God? Who needs Lamentations?
Besides, it is best
to hurry past loss and grief, to get over yesterday's sorrows, and to get on
with today's possibilities. "Everything will be all right."
"Time heals all wounds." "The sun will come up tomorrow."
The goal is a church where "seldom is heard a discouraging word" because
we all know that laments do not market well in a society where life s chief
purpose is to be happy, joyful, and carefree. Who wants to become downcast and
depressed anyway?
Lamentations? Some
insist that the book may be dangerous to our spiritual lives. Grieving over
life s dark turns could signify unbelief and sin. Why, in our post-Pentecost
era, Christ promises to always be present through his Gospel and Sacraments
(Matt 28:20; Heb 13:5). How could we even think about lamenting when we have
Jesus?
Our marching orders
are clear from Romans 9:20, Who are you to answer back to God? Whatever you
do or say, do not argue with God. Be tough. Submit in silence. Put your hand
over your mouth. Go along with whatever happens. God is the Potter, and we are
the clay. And even if life gets messy, it is better to pretend everything is
just fine.
There is a long
history of people in the church who reject Lamentations. Augustine believed
that those who lament have an inordinate affection for this world, while John
Calvin taught that Christians already know why they suffer God teaches and
blesses through it. Consequently, Augustine confined laments to confessions of
sin, while Calvin demanded sporadic use.[7] Oswald Bayer writes,
Since the earliest
days of Christianity, expressions of lament in worship have largely withered.
Because of the influence of Stoic thought, lament was pushed out of the
everyday lives of Christians.[8]
Why are we so reticent to embrace the book of Lamentations? W.F. Dobbs-Allsopp observes: Western culture, in particular, oftentimes appears impatient with or embarrassed by acute grief and deep sorrow and thus rushes to medicate it away. [9] The result? Lamentations is a liber non grata.
If
we spurn the book of Lamentations, what are we losing? Much, very much. Overlooking
Lamentations means we can only utter weak and anemic prayers in the face of
injustice and pain. Thinking that God only cares about our praises, we hesitate
to tell him about our angst and sorrow. When engulfed in sadness, our prayers
seldom diverge from these four words, Thy will be done.
If God s throne is
only a place where we show him esteem and acclaim, we ignore our brokenness and
the brokenness of others. We coldly dismiss people who are struggling and
depressed, who are slogging through difficulties like sickness, disease,
loneliness, divorce, bankruptcy, and the like. Matthew Boulton writes,
To the extent that
Christian churches implicitly or explicitly exclude modes of indignation and
anguish from their liturgies, they effectively abandon indignant and anguished
people, leaving them to suffer these agonies in isolation from the worshiping assembly
and thus also, it may well seem to them, in isolation from God.[10]
Walter Brueggemann further
maintains that when we forfeit laments, Both psychological inauthenticity
and social immobility may be derived from the loss of these texts. [11] We not only relinquish Lamentations spiritual/emotional
healing, but we also lose our engagement with the significant social and
political issues of our day whose challenging issues soon appear to be
improper questions in public places, in schools, in hospitals, with the
government, and eventually even in the courts. [12]
We also see this at
funerals. Instead of solemnity, reverence, and grief, there is a growing
propensity to turn burials into celebrations of life instead of facing the cruel
reality a loved one is dead. Federico Villanueva provides this scathing rebuke:
"There used to be much weeping at funerals; these days, there is karaoke
singing."[13]
When engulfed in
darkness, when its bitterness almost feels tangible, God does not invite us
simply to pray, "Yes, Lord. Whatever you say." No. He wants us to
speak our minds. Pour out our hearts. Even challenge and question him.
Faithfulness does not always imply the passive acceptance of trial and torment.
William Soll writes: "Lament is not merely an articulation of unhappiness;
it seeks in the midst of unhappiness, to recover communion with God. [14] The deep longing to reconnect with Yahweh
lies at the heart of Lamentations. The book s protests explore the fissures of
God s absence and covenantal brokenness.
The
book of Lamentations is just one voice in a much larger choir of lamenters in
the Old Testament. Rebekah cries, If it is this way, why should I live? (Gen
25:22). Moses objects to Yahweh s plan to wipe Israel off the map (Exod
32:11 12). Gideon complains, "If Yahweh is with us, why has all of this
happened to us?" (Judg 6:13). When Saul and Jonathan die on Mt. Gilboa,
David grieves over his unbearable loss (2 Sam 1:23 27). Then, when his son
Absalom is struck down, David again laments (2 Sam 18:33). And even after Joab
reprimands him, the king keeps on weeping (2 Sam 19:4). Rachel mourns over her
lost children (Jer 31:15). Put these prayers together, and what do we learn? To
lament is to stay involved with life, face reality, feel sorrow for the world's
wounds, and become vulnerable before the divine throne of grace. Kathleen O Connor
writes:
Laments announce
aloud and publicly what is wrong right now. Laments create room within the
individual and community not only for grief and loss but also for seeing and
naming injustice. Laments name the weeping and fracturing of
relationships personal, political, domestic, ecclesial, national, and global.
The point of lamenting is to name injustice, hurt, and anger.[15]
Psalmists, for
their part, often acknowledge the raw experiences of life. They cry out to
Yahweh, How long? (e.g., Ps 13:2 4 [EN 13:1 3]), Where is God? (e.g., Ps
79:10), Why? (e.g., Ps 74:1), Are you asleep? (e.g., Ps 44:24 [EN 44:23]),
Wake up! (e.g., Ps 35:23), Listen! (e.g., Ps 17:1). These prayers reject a
fake and pretentious faith. They affirm that distress and setbacks are real.
Federico Villanueva observes, We are most open with the people we are closest
with. The more intimate the relationship, the greater the vulnerability and
openness. Intimacy explains why people in the Bible know how to lament. [16]
Add
Zion in Lamentations to the ensemble of protesters in the book of Psalms. Zion s
I in Lamentations helps readers/hearers find the voice of their despair.[17] Why? Lamentations mostly deletes the
specifics of Jerusalem s defeat striking a more universal note.[18] It omits the names of key leaders on both
sides for instance, it does not mention Nebuchadnezzar, Zedekiah, or Babylon.
Yahweh s past mighty acts of salvation also do not appear; neither do any of
the great heroes of faith Abraham, Moses, or David. The style of the book is
deliberately universalizing, using conventional and traditional descriptions of
the fall of a city that, by their very nature and intent, resist efforts to
treat them as documentary films of what happened. [19]
Jeremiah, the
book s author, gives us historical bits and pieces, snippets and scraps. If he
had provided too much detail, it would be difficult for us to make the book's prayers
our own. Thus, every reader can relate to Lamentations chaos and disorder.
The mourning is for the common loss, and it seems fitting that here there are
no names of the slain, nor private griefs. [20] By giving voice to universal hurt, the book
of Lamentations offers a way forward for sufferers out of the darkness and into
Yahweh s healing light.
When we ignore
grief, it often metastasizes into deadly pathologies that distort reality,
leading us into more pain. Lamentations is Yahweh's "yes" to express
our grief, sorrow, crying, and mourning. The book invites us to place our
shattered hearts into God's loving hands and to face life's setbacks and their
emotional fallout honestly.[21] Lamentations offers spiritual and
theological categories to help us make sense of what happened, as well as how
to survive it. Its poems give us words and images that help us speak the
unspeakable. Every life, and every land and people, has reasons for lament and
complaint. [22]
No
doubt. Because Jerusalem's demise and the ensuing catastrophe are far from the
lived experience for most of us, we do not relate to everything in
Lamentations. We are separated by time, local, language and most obviously,
event. Put bluntly, Babylon overran Zion, not us.
Nevertheless, we
still face disasters. Our world has tsunamis, genocides, pandemics, fires,
earthquakes, mass shootings, mass devastation, and mass starvation. Moreover,
we all face death. When we pray the book of Lamentations, we pray with the
faithful who have been victims of violence, rape, murder, and every sort of
mayhem. We plead with God to turn from judgment to mercy and to heal his broken
world. Brevard Childs writes that Lamentations serves every successive
generation of the suffering faithful for whom history has become unbearable. [23] The book corrects euphoric and celebratory
notions of faith that romantically portray the Christian life as consisting of
only sweetness and light. The cries of anguish in Lamentations help us avoid a
one-sided, happiness-only mindset that fails to deal forthrightly with life s
tragedies.[24] After all, expressing our pain is the first
step towards healing our pain.
Lamentations honors Judah s suffering so we may honor our own and the suffering around us. "In this conversation between worlds, it can help us see our pain, and, by reflecting it to us, however indirectly, it has the potential to affirm our human dignity in a first step towards healing."[25] The book calls us inward to address our wounds. Outward to address the wounds of the world. And upward to bring these wounds before the throne of our loving Savior. Lamentations is a book whose time has come. [26] Do you see? Lamentations is our lament.
[1] This article is adapted from the Concordia
Commentary - Lamentations by R. Reed Lessing (St. Louis: Concordia
Publishing House, 2024).
[2] Todd Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations Catastrophe,
Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2000), 2. He continues, This short biblical book affronts
the reader with a barrage of harsh and violent images: from its opening portrayal
of the city of Jerusalem as an abandoned widow exposed to endless dangers, to
the broken man of chapter three, to the bleak description in chapter four of
the inhabitants of a devastated city, to the final unanswered appeal of chapter
five.
[3] Seidman s story is about a young Jewish woman
in Poland during the late 1980s who throws Lamentations into a fire after the ti bĕ āb liturgy a worship
rite that mourns the Babylonian atrocities of 587 BC, the Roman destruction of
the second temple, as well as other events experienced by the Jews in their
long and tortured history. Naomi Seidman, "Burning the Book of Lamentations,
in Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, ed. Christian B chmann
and Celina Spiegel (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1995), 278-88.
[4] F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations (Louisville:
John Knox Press, 2002), 30.
[5] Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations, 2.
[6] Dobbs-Allsopp maintains that Lamentations may
well be the most remarkable and compelling testament to the human spirit s will
to live in all the Old Testament. Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations, 2.
[7] Kathleen D. Billman and Daniel L. Migliore, Rachel s
Cry: A Prayer of Lament and Rebirth of Hope. (Cleveland: United
Church Press, 1999) 73-74.
[8] Oswald Bayer, Toward a Theology of Lament, in
Caritas et Reformatio: Essays on Church and Society in Honor of Carter
Lindberg, ed. David M. Whitford (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House,
2004), 211.
[9] Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations, 37.
[10] Matthew Boulton, Forsaking God: A Theological
Argument for Christian Lamentations, Scottish Journal of Theology 55
(2002): 58 78, 59.
[11] Walter Brueggemann, The Costly Loss of
Lament, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36 (1986): 57 71, 67.
[12] Brueggemann, The Costly Loss of Lament, 64.
[13] Federico Villanueva, Lamentations: A
Pastoral and Contextual Commentary (Carlisle,
UK: Langham Global Library, 2016), 31.
[14] William M. Soll, The Israelite Lament: Faith
Seeking Understanding. Quarterly Review 8 (1988): 77-88, 79.
[15] Kathleen O Connor, Lamentations and the
Tears of the World , (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), 128.
[16] Villanueva, Lamentations, 14.
[17] What Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 296 373 AD)
wrote about the Psalter holds for Lamentations: He recognizes [the Psalms] as
being his own words. And the one who hears is deeply moved, as though he
himself were speaking, and is affected by the words of the songs, as if they
were his own songs. Athnasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to
Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 109.
[18] Delbert Hillers observes, Such history as
we have it in Lamentations is not told with an eye to the unique, particular,
unrepeatable, contingent circumstances; it is experienced and narrated in
conformity to certain pre-existing literary and religious patterns. Delbert Hillers,
History and Poetry in Lamentations, Currents in Theology and Mission 10
(1983): 155-61, 160. These patterns make the book accessible to future generations.
[19] Hillers, Lamentations Introduction,
Translation, and Notes, Anchor Bible 7A (Garden City: Doubleday,
1992), 10.
[20] Hillers, Lamentations, 5.
[21] Grief creates a canon within the biblical
canon, headed by the books of Job and Lamentations and the lament psalms in the
book of Psalms (Leslie C. Allen, A Liturgy of Grief: A Pastoral Commentary
on Lamentations. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011, 25).
[22] Miriam J. Bier
and Tim Bulkeley, eds., Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of
Lament. (Eugene: Pickwick Press, 2013), xv.
[23] Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old
Testament as Scripture. London: SCM Press, 1979, 596.
[24] Robin Parry writes, If the only prayer
language into which believers are inducted through communal worship is that of
thanksgiving, praise, and adoration then we are depriving believers of a
language for dealing with the dark periods of life. We are also communicating
the message that to speak to God with words of complaint and lament is somehow
inappropriate, irreverent, and unfaithful (in spite of the fact that Jesus
himself took the words of a complaint Psalm upon his lips while on the cross).
In this way, we are in danger of failing to train disciples to walk with God
through the valley of the shadow of death ( Wrestling with Lamentations in Christian
Worship, Pages 175 97 in Great is Thy Faithfulness? Toward Reading
Lamentations as Sacred Scripture. Edited by Robin Parry and Heath A.
Thomas. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2011, 194).
[25] O Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the
World, 4.
[26] Paul M. Joyce and Diana Lipton, Lamentations
Through the Centuries, Diana Lipton. Lamentations Through the Centuries.
West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 7. Christopher Wright maintains: Never to
read Lamentations is to miss the challenge and reward of wrestling with the
massive theological issues that permeate its poetry. How can the ultimate
extremes of suffering be endured alongside faith in the living God whom we have
learned from the scriptures and in experience to be all-loving and good? (The
Message of Lamentations, Downers Grove: IVP, 2015, 22).