Bible 101, part 8: WHEN GOD IS FAR AWAY: Lament in the Bible
Lamentations 1:1-8b, 2:18-19, 3:1,17-26, 5:21-22
August 16, 2009 - Rev.
Janet Robertson Duggins
As most of you know, I facilitate a support group for women
who have depression, here at
There is something about not having your pain acknowledged that seems to make it more painful. It’s isolating, and often increases depression. Pressure to put on a happy cheerful face when weighed down by sadness can make a heavy burden seem heavier. Denial of everything that’s not strong and positive feels false, even as there is a sense that it’s expected. But the longing for a place and a way to express those difficult and painful feelings doesn’t go away.
I don’t think we understand this really very well in our society, where we value strength and optimism and a can-do attitude so much. But the Bible does understand this need for honest expression of suffering, and offers numerous examples of it. In fact, a whole genre of Biblical literature known as the lament is all about speaking the truth of our pain. Laments take deeply felt pain, sorrow, disappointment, anger, doubt, and despair… and put it into words, in the presence of God and the community.
Laments are poems, or rather, prayers that are poems, and we touched on them briefly a few weeks ago when we focused on poems and songs of the Bible, but it seemed to me that this special category of Biblical poetry deserved attention in its own right. About a third of the Psalms are laments, and of course the whole book of Lamentations, which we heard from this morning; laments are also found among the prophetic writings and in the wisdom literature – think Job - and elsewhere. I don’t think most of us think of the Bible as having quite as much lament in it as it does; probably because we read very little of it, relative to its quantity. That’s too bad, because it has a lot to offer us.
Before we look at some of the laments of the ancient Israelites, what they had to say about the things that caused them pain and sorrow, I’d like us to think for a moment about our own circumstances. What are some of the things that we may feel troubled, or pained, or angry or confused about?
There are the individual concerns that weigh on our minds:
- health issues
- the needs of our children or our elderly relatives
- job, finding a job
- paying the bills
- whether we’ll have enough money to retire
- friends or relatives who are ill
- grief for loved ones we will never stop missing
- people who hurt us and betray our trust
And there are the things that affect the wider community of our city, our church, our nation or our world:
- conflicts that won’t go away
- the pain of those who are excluded
- injustices of all kinds
- untold numbers of people who suffer from lack of basic needs
- abuse of the vulnerable
- rampant greed
- pollution
We could go on and on, probably. Many of the things that pain us are different from what the laments in the Bible touch on but lots of them are not that different. And the feelings are much the same: we are angry, we are fearful, we are sad and hurt; we wonder where God is.
The Biblical laments express those same feelings. Some are in the voice of an individual (using “I” “me” and “my”) and some are communal (using “we,” “us,” and “our”). There is even a very specific type of lament referred to as a “city lament,” which is prominent in Lamentations. (That tells you something about the vulnerability of cities in the ancient middle-east!)
Like other Biblical poetry, laments make use of vivid imagery, metaphors, repetition, and rhythms that may not always come across well in translation but which mirror the mood of the words.
Typical elements of the lament are;
+ words addressed to God
+ expression of grief
+ complaint(s)
+ reasons why God ought to act on behalf of the speaker(s)
+ petition for justice or vengeance
+ promise to praise God
Psalm 13 is a “typical” lament in which you can see a number of those elements:
How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O LORD my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
and my enemy will say, "I have prevailed";
my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me.
In 2 Samuel 1, we find another individual lament. Here, David is mourning the deaths of Saul and his son Jonathan who was David’s friend:
Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon your high places!
How the mighty have fallen!
Tell it not in
or the daughters of the Philistines will rejoice,
the daughters of the uncircumcised will exult….
Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely!
In life and in death they were not divided;
they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.
O daughters of
who clothed you with crimson, in luxury,
who put ornaments of gold on your apparel.
How the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle!
Jonathan lies slain upon your high places.
I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished!
The book of Lamentations – containing both individual and
corporate laments – expresses the pain and disorientation of a community in the
aftermath of catastrophe: the
destruction of the city of
These poems could have been written after any one of several invasions of the city, probably by the armies of the Babylonian empire. These events left the survivors devastated, not only because of family members and property lost, but because their whole sense of who they were as a community and as God’s people was shaken to the core. The poems in this book give expression to that pain and lostness. They don’t gloss it over or soften it at all. In fact, they tell it in thorough and appalling detail.
One of the most interesting things about Lamentations is that four of its five poems are acrostics, and the fifth, though not an acrostic, has a structure similar to the other four. By acrostic I mean that, in Hebrew, each stanza begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It would be as if we described a painful time in our lives as presenting us with every problem from A to Z: abuse, backstabbing, confusion, depression, exclusion, fear, greedy people, hunger… and on and on through the alphabet. You get the idea. And as if we then went back and started over again at A and went through the same routine again. It’s the kind of recital that makes people sorry they asked “how are you doing?”
But it reminds us that suffering cannot be gotten past in a hurry. We tend to be uncomfortable with pain – other peoples, and even our own. We want to hurry on to comfort, to put it all behind us. But it’s hardly ever as quick and easy as we’d like. The laments of Lamentations urge us to go through the pain, acknowledge it, and not look for a short cut.
Lamentations is not a book that offers a lot of answers, so if we are used to looking at the Bible for answers we may be disappointed in it. But it’s a work of literature – therefore a work of art, and art is more about giving expression and meaning and honor to our experience than it is about answers.
We may question the theological perspective of these laments that attribute all this suffering to God’s abandonment, punishment of the people for their waywardness. It’s ok, I think, if we don’t adopt exactly that same view. But it’s important to understand that it reflects a radical belief in God’s sovereign power. And it’s certainly easy enough to relate to the feeling of abandonment or punishment by God that is expressed so often throughout the laments.
These are very honest expressions. Their writers don’t pretend to more faith than they feel.. And they do not deny the part that their own sin has played in causing their problems. This is not a kind of honesty we are very good at. While we are – rightly – hesitant to adopt the view of Lamentations that troubles are punishment from God, sometimes we go too far the other way, and fail to be entirely honest about our own part: for our sins of omission and commission do contribute to some of our pain.
In one part, the writer of Lamentations uses a memorable image: his sins, he says, were taken and fashioned, by Gods hand, into a yoke (as for a team or oxen or horses) and set on his shoulders. “They weigh on my neck,” he says, sapping my strength.” How true this is!
But if there is no denial of responsibility here there is no passive acceptance of suffering as deserved or inevitable, either. The poems of Lamentations are persistent in petitioning God, almost haranguing God, in fact, to do something about it.
In that way, these laments are ultimately expressions of faithfulness to God, because these people understand that they have only this one God, for better or for worse. They are angry at God, angry at their enemies. They don’t understand. They protest. They see very little hope. But they still cling to God. They demand for God to see their predicament, hear their pain, and act on their behalf. The laments are wholly oriented toward God, in spite of everything.
Here and there, throughout the poems, the speaker interrupts the telling of what happened, and what that was like, to address God directly, and exclaim something like “O Lord, consider the suffering of your people!” But even when God is not addressed directly, every word is very clearly uttered in the presence of God.
Think again about the structure of an alphabetic acrostic for detailing the specifics of hurts and troubles. You begin with A and you know that at Z there is an end. You might, like the writers of Lamentations, go back to the beginning and start over again, but eventually you get the sense that the ground has been covered. You begin to understand that there is a limit to even to those things that are overwhelmingly evil and wrong and painful. It has to be taken seriously. But it’s not infinite or inexhaustible.
But God is.
And so, when all is said and done,
after all our sins and failures and mistakes,
and their bitter consequences,
after all the hurt that can be done to us by others,
after all the injustice and suffering and trouble of life …
God remains.
And no matter what we feel, or what we can or cannot be sure of,
like God’s people long ago,
one of the most important reassurances our scriptures offer us is that there is nothing about our lives, our world, our feelings
that cannot be spoken to God.
Resources on Lamentations:
Kathleen M. O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World
Eugene Peterson, Five
Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work
F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations (Interpretation Commentary
Series)