Sitting in the Rubble

Today's Reading

Read Lamentations 1 in full. It is the city of Jerusalem personified as a widow, sitting in the dust. "How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations!" The chapter does not end with hope. It ends with, "Let all their evildoing come before you, and deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all my transgressions; for my groans are many, and my heart is faint."

Read Lamentations 3:1-39 — the long middle chapter, the famous turn at verses 21-24, and the careful theological reasoning that follows. Read Lamentations 5 — the entire book's closing prayer, ending with: "But you, O Lord, reign forever; your throne endures to all generations. Why do you forget us forever, why do you forsake us for so many days? Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old — unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us." That is how the book ends. With a question. With the door not quite shut, but not opened either.

Read Jeremiah 9:1 — "Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" The man traditionally associated with Lamentations.

Reflection

In 587 BC, the Babylonian army breached the walls of Jerusalem, burned the temple, and carried most of the surviving population into exile. The city — Yahweh's city, the city of David, the city the prophets had said would be untouchable so long as it was faithful — lay in ruins. The temple, the architectural argument that God dwelt with his people, was rubble.

Someone, sitting inside that wreckage, wrote a book.

Tradition assigns it to Jeremiah, the prophet who had warned for forty years that this would happen and was hated for it. Whether or not the author was Jeremiah, the book reads like the work of a man who had every right to say I told you so and instead sat down in the ashes and wept for everyone he had warned. The whole book is poetry. It is structured carefully — four of the five chapters are alphabetical acrostics, working through the Hebrew alphabet, as if grief itself needed to be ordered or it would consume the writer. But within the structure, the content is undiluted lament. There is no political analysis here. No assignment of blame to enemies. No promise that the bad guys will get theirs. Only the slow tracing of what has been lost.

Chapter 1: the city as widow. "She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has none to comfort her... her children have gone away, captives before the foe."

Chapter 2: God as enemy. "The Lord has become like an enemy; he has swallowed up Israel; he has swallowed up all its palaces; he has laid in ruins its strongholds." That sentence is in your Bible. The Holy Spirit kept it in.

Chapter 3: the personal voice. "I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light... He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; he has broken my bones... though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer." For sixty-six verses the prophet describes what it is like to feel that God himself is hunting him.

And then, in the middle of chapter three — verse 21 — the famous turn: "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."

This is the line we have on coffee mugs and wall art. Great is thy faithfulness. The hymn is named after it. We sing it at weddings.

We have done the line a kind of violence. We have torn it out of its context and made it a sunny affirmation. But in Lamentations, that verse is not the conclusion. It is not even the beginning. It is verse 22 of chapter 3. There are sixty-six verses of grief before it, and there is a fourth chapter and a fifth chapter still to come — more grief, ending in a question — Have you utterly rejected us? — that the book never resolves.

Read the verse properly and it is even more astonishing. The line is not, "I feel God's mercies." The line is, "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope." The prophet is making himself remember. The mercy is not currently visible. The temple is rubble; the children are dead; the people are in chains. The prophet is choosing, in the middle of a grief so total that it has filled three chapters and will fill two more, to call to mind what he knows about God. This is faith working in the dark. This is not denial. The grief is not retracted. The next verse does not say, and so the rubble was rebuilt. It says, the Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him. The hope is not in circumstances changing. The hope is in God being God, even now, when nothing else is.

John Calvin wrote a commentary on Lamentations late in his life, and he saw something in chapter 3 that the modern reader often misses. Calvin noticed that the prophet's hope is theological before it is experiential. The prophet is not waiting until he feels better to believe in God's mercy. He is asserting God's mercy as a piece of unchanged Christian doctrine, and that doctrine is what slowly pulls him back to the surface. Calvin's pastoral instinct here is enormous: in the dark, you do not start with feeling. You start with what you know. Then you wait, in the dark, for the feeling to follow — sometimes for years.

The genius of Lamentations as a book is that it places the famous turn inside a structure that does not resolve. Chapter 3 has hope. Chapter 4 returns to grief. Chapter 5 ends in a plea — a plea, not an answer. The book teaches that biblical hope is not the cancellation of grief but a memory carried through the grief. The exile is still on. Jerusalem is still gone. The author still has to live the rest of his life in a world where that is true. And in that world, every morning, the mercies are new. Even when you cannot see them.

Augustine knew this. His sentence about distance — that we find lamentation strange not because we are too happy but because we are too far from God — applies to whole churches as well as to individuals. A church that cannot sit in Lamentations 1 is a church that is keeping a polite distance from God. A church that knows only the coffee-mug verse and not the rubble it sits inside is a church that has lost its capacity to pastor anyone whose life has actually fallen apart. Tim Keller put it carefully: lament is "the honest cry of a hurting heart wrestling with the paradox of pain and the promise of God's goodness." The wrestling is the point. Lamentations is five chapters of wrestling, and the Spirit canonized every one of them.

There are seasons in your life when Lamentations 5 is more honest than Romans 8. Both are in the same Bible. The Holy Spirit was not careless when he gave us a book of grief alongside the gospel of grace. He gave us the whole thing because we live the whole thing.

So today, if you have rubble in your life — a marriage, a vocation, a body, a child, a faith — sit in it for a while with the prophet. You do not have to perform the turn yet. The turn comes when it comes. Sometimes it comes after sixty-six verses. Sometimes it comes after years. In the meantime, you are not abandoned. The Spirit who inspired this book is praying it through you while you wait.

Going Deeper

Read Lamentations 3:21-24 in its full context — verses 1-39 — and notice everything around the famous lines. Then ask: in the seasons when I have quoted "great is thy faithfulness," have I been honoring the verse, or merely the cross-stitch version of it? What would it look like to mean it in the way the prophet meant it?