I like using the lectionary for these Sunday posts because it forces me to read scriptures that I’d otherwise skip. But I have tried to write about Lamentations several times all week, and am still not sure I have anything meaningful to say about it.
The easiest strategy would be to start and stop with the lovely words of faith that begins this week’s reading: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam 3:22-23).
But we shouldn’t read of God’s unceasing love without remembering that the same author has wept over the sorrows “which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger” (1:12). We want to celebrate God’s endless mercies, but must keep in mind that our poet has previously lamented how the “Lord has destroyed without mercy all the dwellings of Jacob” (2:2). For that matter, Lamentations does not end with a reassurance of God’s goodness “to those who wait on him,” but with the fear that God has “utterly rejected us and [is] angry with us beyond measure” (5:22).
As a Christian, I can at least read this poetry in light of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, with a fuller understanding of just how great God’s faithfulness proved to be. But Lamentations is part of our canon for a reason. It asks an ancient question that God’s people continue to ask to this day, a question that Jesus himself asks from the Cross: Why has God forsaken us?
While it’s certainly possible to come up with theological answers, this week I’ve tried instead “to sit alone in silence when the Lord has imposed it” (3:28) and see what comes to mind.
First, I was reminded that scriptures like Lamentations give voice to the present, not just the past. As much as he speaks for 6th century BC people left behind after the fall of Jerusalem and the exile of its leaders, our poet expresses the confusion, frustration, sorrow, and anger of 21st century AD people whose suffering, loss, and helplessness also leaves them feeling like God has made them “sit in darkness like the dead of long ago” (3:6). In scripture, God inspired words that articulate the full range of human experience at all times and in all places, including affliction, tribulation, and desolation.
But also hope. That term shows up twice in today’s text. In the first instance, “I will hope in him” is presented as something “my soul” tells the poet — a reminder from deep within a person on the verge of being lost to despair.
Then the second shows up almost as an afterthought. The NRSV even turns it into a parenthetical remark:
It is good for one to bear
the yoke in youth,
to sit alone in silence
when the Lord has imposed it,
to put one's mouth to the dust
(there may yet be hope),
to give one's cheek to the smiter,
and be filled with insults.Lamentations 3:28-30
Not just the parched ground of a rainless land (Deut 28:24), dust in the Old Testament is the stuff of plagues (Ex 8:16-17, 9:9), the fate of false idols (2 Kgs 23), a sign of despair (Josh 7:6, Job 2:12), and the desiccated destiny of all mortal flesh. To put one’s mouth in the dust is to descend as low as possible into the Hebrew scriptures’ favored metaphor for death.
But even there, “(there may yet be hope).” For dust is both an unavoidable reminder of sin’s curse (Gen 3:19) and a metaphor for the impossible extent of God’s blessing (Gen 28:14). Putting one’s mouth to the dust is also to mirror what God did in first breathing life into humanity (Gen 2:7). To sink that low is also to prepare for salvation, since it is from dust that God raises the poor (1 Sam 2:8, Ps 113:7).
So what is there to say this morning? Whatever our circumstances — and however much they feel like God’s punishment — (there may yet be hope).
Next week’s lectionary readings: 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; Psalm 48; Mark 6:1-13; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10.