Lamentations

Lamentations

Introduction

The book of Lamentations is a short collection of poetry written after the fall of Judah, lamenting the state of the portion of the nation remained in the land after the fall. The authorship of Lamentations is unknown. It has been attributed to Jeremiah, but there is no early evidence to support such authorship. If it were written by Jeremiah, it would have to be entirely prophetic, as he did not remain in the land of Judah, but went with other refugees to Egypt (Jeremiah 43:5-7).

The poems are all alphabetic poems, according to the Hebrew alphabet. Each chapter has twenty-two verses (except Chapter 3, which has sixty-six) because, in the original Hebrew, each line begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In chapters 2 and 4, the ascending order is slightly confused, in that P comes before O. Whether this is the work of the original author or is due to some later rearrangement of the text, we do not know. Chapter 3 is three times as long because in it each letter of the alphabet gets three consecutive verses. All of this is quite lost in translation for us, but the highly structured, formulaic feel is still available.

The Lord Is in the Right

Chapter 1 eloquently describes the situation for the remnant in Judah. In verses 1-5 it tells of the fallen glory of the city and of the suffering of the people. Further, these verses explain that, though the people are in the wrong, their situation is due to the actions o the Lord. This line of thinking is reiterated in verses 18-22, where the author clearly states that the Lord is in the right. However, to attribute the downfall completely to the actions of the Lord is to ignore the fact that the people repeatedly did what they should not have done and did not do what they should have.

We know from reading Job, for example, that bad things happen to people for reasons we cannot explain. We know from reading about the life of Jeremiah or the life of Christ that people sometimes put themselves at risk in order to serve the will of the Lord. The story of Israel and Judah of is a story of people who continually made bad choices and eventually paid for their own mistakes. It is a story that tells us that there is Right and Wrong, and our actions do make a difference. In this first lamentation, the author seems to have come far enough to realize just that, but perhaps nothing more.

Who Can Heal You?

The suggestion that the Lord is completely to blame for the situation is even stronger in Chapter 2, where in verses 1-5 the Lord is described as acting with fierce anger, and more than once as acting as an enemy. Throughout the chapter the Lord is described as the aggressor, and the fault of the people is not mentioned. In verse 13, the poet suggests, in the same vein as the old spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”, that there is no suffering to compare to that of the people of Judah, and asks who can heal them.

There is a sense, of course, in which this is just self-centered wallowing. We know from the latter chapters of Jeremiah that God was bringing judgment not only on Israel and Judah, but on all the nations. (See also Jeremiah 25: 27-29) There is a sense in which it was accurate, however. We are all individuals, and our problems are our own. And, we all sometimes feel the need to rail at the Lord and fall further into self-pity rather than appealing to the Lord for help. The Lord is a big God and can easily withstand our self-centered lamentations, but it is not the encounter that God desires, because it is not the encounter that changes our lives.

Why?

Skipping, for the moment, to Chapter 4, we see the astonishment of the people that such things could happen to them, the chosen people of the Lord. Verse 12 says no one on earth expected Jerusalem to fall, and verse 20 says they believed they had the protection of the Lord’s anointed king. Behind this chapter is the unasked question of “why?” Even though the people will admit to their sin or, in this chapter, to the sin of their prophets and priests, there is still the question of why a loving God would treat them so unmercifully.

The question continues in Chapter 5, which begins in verse 1 asking the Lord to remember what has happened to the people. The following verses are another litany of their fallen state. In verses 19-22, the poet asks why, when the Lord has power over all things, they still suffer. The book of Lamentations ends with the awful hypothesis that the Lord has become so angry as to reject them forever.

Hope

While this is a dramatic ending for the book of Lamentations, it is not the final word. No matter how desperate our situation may seem there is always hope. Though we may never know the why of our situation, because we cannot know the mind of God, the heart of God has been revealed to us, and we know that God always loves us. This thought was not lost even on the writer of Lamentations, as we see in Chapter 3, verses 19-33.

Though we may speak of “The patience of Job” and remind ourselves to wait patiently for the Lord, there is none so patient as the Lord. Sometimes we have to be patient with ourselves, that we may put aside our self-righteousness, our self-pity, our self-denial, or whatever else it is that separates us from the salvation of the Lord, which is always waiting for us.