Lamentations 1.12-16
Delivered on Friday 21 March 2008 in St Saviour's, Larkhall
Lamentations 1.12-16
The following was written as a reflection for a service of Compline.
Read Mark 15.42-end
From quite early on the church has seen the Lamentations of Jeremiah as a prophetic expression of the desolation and sorrow of the first Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Jeremiah lamented over the city of Jerusalem after it had fallen to Babylon.
Read Lamentations 1.12-16
Jeremiah's words tell us two very important things, as we sit in the place of heartache, waiting for God to bring redemption.
First, he insists that God has done this terrible thing: v.12, the LORD inflicted this on me; v.13, he sent fire, he left me stunned; v.14, he caused my strength to fail; etc. You may think this presents a rather dark view of God—and in a sense you'd be right—but only by clinging onto God's sovereignty can there be any hope. After all, if God is not in control, then things really are as bad as they seem.
Second, Lamentations 1-4 consists of four acrostic poems, as Jeremiah begins each line with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This is more than word games: at the very same moment that Jeremiah cries out to God that things make no sense, that he can see only chaos, the structure of his poem says: there is order beneath it all, somewhere, though I can't see how.
On Holy Saturday two thousand years ago, there were no signs of hope. The first disciples were forced to wait for God to act, though they didn't expect him to. They thought Jesus had failed; like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they thought Jesus couldn't have been who they thought he was, or he wouldn't have died.
We are fortunate to be sitting this side of Easter. We know that the disciples' heartache turned to joy, that God raised his broken Son from the dead, that he turned total defeat into total victory. Jesus died, yes, but God raised him up, the first-born of many brothers and sisters. Of this we can be confident.
But sometimes we can feel like God is only really interested in the 'big stuff', not the things that go wrong in my life, and your life. We can feel like Jeremiah, crying out into the darkness, 'Why, Lord?' Sometimes no matter how hard we look we can see only chaos.
Lamentations teaches us to affirm God's sovereignty and the hidden order behind chaos, as the beginning of hope. Easter is the ultimate example of God bringing hope out of chaos: Jesus went farther from God than any of us could ever go, but God brought him back.
The first Holy Saturday was of course a Sabbath day, the day of rest after the completed work of redemption. And it can be our day of rest as well, an opportunity for us to learn afresh that sometimes, like it or not, we must wait for God's hope to be revealed from amidst the chaos. We must rest in the knowledge that God works in ways we can't imagine, clinging to the hope that he is working all things together for the good of those he loves.
Read the poem on Tom Wright, The Cross and the Colliery, p.67
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