Lamentations 4:1-22

Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us; 

look, and see our disgrace! 

2  Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, 

our homes to foreigners.

Lamentations 5 is not so much a lament as a prayer. It is a prayer of last desperation, for times when everything else has failed to bring suffering to an end.

Perhaps this sense of desperation explains why Lamentations 5 is not an acrostic. The poem is divided into twenty-two verses, but they do not begin with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This has led some scholars to think that the fifth lament is only a rough draft the writer later intended to work into an acrostic. But an acrostic is such an obvious literary structure that it is hard to believe a lament could have slipped into the book without being reworked. More likely, the decision not to arrange the fifth lament in alphabetical order was deliberate, with the intention that the poem’s disorderly structure would mirror the chaotic state of the city.

Lamentations chapter 4 depicted the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem and its aftermath. Chapter 5 describes in fuller detail the hell of those who were left in Judah after 587 BC to live under the Babylonian empire’s heavy boot. The body of the chapter can be best understood as a portrait of occupation and the deprivation, humiliation, and frustration that accompany it. Jeremiah 39 through 43 details these miserable years that followed the initial shock of Jerusalem’s death.

The Judeans not deported to Babylon lived in social, political, and religious chaos. Those left behind were the ones considered not useful enough to be taken back to Babylon. These were the too old, too young, too weak, too uneducated. For them, life became the longest of nights. Physical necessities, personal safety, honor, and human dignity all buckled and collapsed along with the city’s buildings and walls.

In chapters one and two, daughter Zion enables individual sufferers to give voice to their torment. This keeps people from feeling lost in a faceless and nameless corporate totality. Now, in Lamentations 5, the book swings its pendulum the other way, assuring 6th-century Judahites that they do not suffer alone, but corporately. Jeremiah reaches his goal. The people pray. God does not immediately answer their prayer. Not in this book. He has however already anticipated this situation a century earlier and provided beautiful gospel promises in Isaiah 40 through 55, and he will speak to them again through the later exilic and postexilic prophets. In Lamentations, then, Jeremiah functions like Job’s friend Elihu, whose poetic discourse prepares Job along with his friends to hear the voice of God himself. (Job 32-41).

While survivors protest in chapters 1 through 4, the book ends in repentance and supplication in chapter 5, the shortest and least acrostic chapter in the book. By abandoning the form of the first 4 chapters, the poem refuses the closure that an acrostic structure would imply. Jeremiah leaves so much unresolved at the end of the book. The land is still in the possession of the enemy, children and mothers are still destitute, Babylonian oppression is still wreaking havoc, starvation is still raging, women are still being violated, and both the old and young are still disdained.

Jeremiah’s final lament begins with an appeal for God to recall what his people have suffered:

Remember, O LORD, what has befallen us; look, and see our disgrace! (5:1)

This appeal is followed by a somber recitation of Jerusalem’s degradation— occupation, abandonment, bereavement, thirst, poverty, inflation, invasion, famine, dependency, slavery, exposure, rape, humiliation, and exhaustion:

 Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to foreigners. We have become orphans, fatherless; our mothers are like widows. We must pay for the water we drink; the wood we get must be bought. Our pursuers are at our necks; we are weary; we are given no rest. We have given the hand to Egypt, and to Assyria, to get bread enough. Our fathers sinned, and are no more; and we bear their iniquities. Slaves rule over us; there is none to deliver us from their hand. We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness. Our skin is hot as an oven with the burning heat of famine. Women are raped in Zion, young women in the towns of Judah. Princes are hung up by their hands; no respect is shown to the elders. Young men are compelled to grind at the mill, and boys stagger under loads of wood. (2-13)

After the invocation in verse one, the prayer continues with a long description of the suffering of a once proud and glorious place (5:2-18). It ends with a series of “why” questions (5:19-22), Similar to elements of the Psalms and Job’s laments in Job 3:11ff. It’s also significant that the book concludes not with resolution, but with an eye to the future. The lament calls on God to act to restore them.

In verses 14 through 18, Jeremiah sums up the suffering of the people:

The old men have left the city gate, the young men their music. The joy of our hearts has ceased; our dancing has been turned to mourning. The crown has fallen from our head; woe to us, for we have sinned! For this our heart has become sick, for these things our eyes have grown dim, for Mount Zion which lies desolate; jackals prowl over it. 

Those verses summarize the outcome of a prophecy Jeremiah received in Jeremiah 16:1-9:

The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place. 3 For thus says the Lord concerning the sons and daughters who are born in this place, and concerning the mothers who bore them and the fathers who fathered them in this land: 4 They shall die of deadly diseases. They shall not be lamented, nor shall they be buried. They shall be as dung on the surface of the ground. They shall perish by the sword and by famine, and their dead bodies shall be food for the birds of the air and for the beasts of the earth. 

5 “For thus says the Lord: Do not enter the house of mourning, or go to lament or grieve for them, for I have taken away my peace from this people, my steadfast love and mercy, declares the Lord. 6 Both great and small shall die in this land. They shall not be buried, and no one shall lament for them or cut himself or make himself bald for them. 7 No one shall break bread for the mourner, to comfort him for the dead, nor shall anyone give him the cup of consolation to drink for his father or his mother. 8 You shall not go into the house of feasting to sit with them, to eat and drink. 9 For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will silence in this place, before your eyes and in your days, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.

Jeremiah describes a silent, lonely city. “Woe to us, for we have sinned!” he laments (v. 16b). To translate the verse more accurately, “If only we had never sinned!” His beloved Jerusalem has become a place without music, merriment, or mirth. The sacred temple mount has become a haunt for scavengers.

The fall of Jerusalem did not, however, mean the end of God’s kingship. The dominance of Babylon never posed a threat to his sovereign rule. If anything, the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of her citizens demonstrated that God still ruled the nations, that he was continuing to work out his purpose in human history. In spite of the sufferings of his people, Jeremiah recognized that God was still in control. He testified, “But you, O LORD, reign forever; your throne endures to all generations” (v. 19).

Even though he knew he was a citizen of a greater and more enduring kingdom, the prophet still had a question. He wondered whether there was still a place in God’s plan for the Jewish people. He asked:

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. (vv. 20– 22)

In the words of one commentator, “The Lord’s stern discipline has awakened within Judah a sense of her own sinfulness, worthlessness, and helplessness. And finally, out of the depths of the bitterness occasioned by divine chastisement, she invokes God’s grace and compassion.” Lamentations thus ends with a prayer for national restoration and spiritual renewal. Jeremiah understood that renewal is up to God, that it depends on his divine initiative. Regeneration always precedes repentance. Before God’s people return, they must first be restored, which only God can do.

Jeremiah knew that God could restore Jerusalem, but he wondered if he would. His prayer seems doubtful as well as hopeful, raising the unwelcome prospect that Jerusalem is beyond redemption. Has God utterly rejected his people? Is he angry beyond measure? The possibility of being beyond redemption is so alarming that many Jews refuse to end their reading of Lamentations with the book’s final verse. To this day, whenever the book is read, it is the custom in many synagogues to repeat verse 21 after verse 22.

That is not how Lamentations was written, however. The book ends the way God intended it to end, with the kind of unresolved anguish we have come to expect from the Weeping Prophet. Yet Lamentations was never intended to have the last word. The questions it raises were ones Jeremiah could not fully answer.

There are many times when Christians find themselves asking the same kinds of questions: Has God rejected me? Can I still be saved? Is there any hope? Will my sufferings ever come to an end? In this troubled world, comparable questions often need to be asked about the sufferings of others: Why does God allow persecution and oppression? What purpose does he hope to accomplish through warfare and famine? 

Unlike Jeremiah, we can do more than ask such questions. We can trust the answer God has provided through the atoning death of Jesus Christ, who makes this promise: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).

CONCLUSION: GRIEVING

Men carrying machine guns load women and children into trucks, drive them to a mass grave, and fill their bodies with bullets. Godless governments trapped citizens in abject poverty with no way out. Infants are frantic for food, orphans are longing for a home, young mothers are trafficked as sex slaves, and entire countries are on the brink of economic collapse.

When we consider all the evil in the world, including but not limited to, pornography, terrorism, rampant greed, substance addiction, it’s tempting to hang our heads in frustration, shrug our shoulders, and get on with life as best we can. Overwhelming evidence shows that the pillaging profiteers of unrighteousness are winning the day. Our response is to tune out. Numb out. Check out.

Is there a better way? Yes. And I hope by now you have begun to see that better way. While the historical context of Lamentations is the immediate aftermath of 587 BC, the power of its poetry can embrace the sufferings of any whose bodies and spirits are worn down and assaulted, whose boundaries have shrunk, who are trapped, and who face foreclosed futures.

It wasn’t until 1980 that the American Psychiatric Association added the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” to its diagnostic manual. PTSD describes what can happen to veterans, battered women, rape survivors, and abused children. It characterizes people ruled by tyrants, whether they rule families or nations. Long after the danger is passed, traumatized people relive the event as though it were continually recurring in the present. They cannot resume the normal course of their lives because the trauma repeatedly interrupts.

These victims become frozen in time. Memories replay repeatedly as nightmares. They rehash traumatic moments not only in their thinking but even in their dreaming. The smallest word, smell, sound, can send a victim back into their trauma. It destroys people’s capacity to tell their story. Their memories are scattered, but they cannot put them together. It is all a bunch of emotional and mental mumbo jumbo.

Trauma victims draw a curtain between the past and the present. Insidiously, the traumatizers encourage, in some cases insist on secrecy and silence. When this fails, they launch attacks against the credibility of the victim. These things were going on in Judah following the Babylonian conflict. And they are going on in our day as well. That is simply the price we pay for living in a sin cursed world.

Lamentations replays memories of cannibalism, famine, rape, and the complete dismantling of a city and her people. Other symptoms of PTSD visible here are the lack of consolation and comfort and the overwhelming grief. Survivors were shocked, isolated, had memories of better days, and felt deep shame. They were stuck in silence and expressed bargaining, anger, denial, weeping, and blaming. Warfare brutalizes people while numbing and deadening their hearts. A single traumatic event can occur almost anywhere. Prolonged, repeated trauma, by contrast, occurs only in circumstances of captivity. And the conquering Babylonians had the Judeans right where they wanted them, completely subjected.

But the empire could not take away the pen from Jeremiah. The prophet gives meaning to pain, provides words to replace silence, and resurrects personal agency. Medically, the binding up of the mental wounds caused by suffering is every bit as important as healing the sufferer’s physical wounds.

Jeremiah encourages us not to deny the past nor to get stuck in it. Instead, he invites us to work through our past. Sharing the traumatic experience with others is a precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world. But how? Trauma often prevents survivors from discussing their experiences. And even if they are able to find words, it is difficult to put them into a coherent sentence. Trauma stops the chronological clock and fixes the moment permanently in memory and imagination.

Experts maintain that recovery unfolds in three stages. The central work the first stage is the establishment of safety. Task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The main work of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life. You will see every one of those stages played out in Lamentations if you go back and read it with that framework in mind. None of it plays out in a linear manner in Lamentations because grief is not a straight-line journey from point A to point B. 

The general development is from fear to security, from denial to acceptance, from stigmatized detachment to community connection. Describing feelings is important to every stage. Finding a language for pain is one of the needs of those afflicted. Jeremiah knew this. He didn’t know it because he had a psychology degree, he knew it because he was God’s prophet, and he was called by God to minister to the hurting people undergoing God’s discipline. The proof that God had not abandoned his covenant was that he left a minister of his covenant to lead his people through their grief and give them words for their suffering. 

Through the ages, Lamentations has helped the faithful survive disasters by giving them a way to express shock and sadness. The book summons us to express our pent-up frustrations and put them on the table in a safe environment under the love of God in the community of faith. In doing so, negative emotions begin to lose their power, and, little by little, we find we can, in fact, deal with our trauma. Lamentations can melt frozen and numbed spirits.

When we do not talk and pray through trauma, we become slaves to emotions we can neither understand nor control. However, by giving his words the echo our feelings, Lamentations becomes our way out of despondence and despair. The inspired book’s words are God’s words given to heal and to make us whole. We can cry out to God in agony. We do not need to hide from God. We can scream in anger to God, against God, and finally with God, who in Jesus shared our limits and sorrows.

The only way Jeremiah could have ministered to that traumatized and decimated community was to minister out of his own trauma and suffering through which he had trudged for 40 years. He was a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. As I have worked through this text for you and with you, I think it’s hard for us not to see how Jeremiah prefigures Jesus. At best, Jeremiah was ignored. At worst he was abused, beaten, imprisoned, and starved for carrying out the express will of God. The prophet does not stay to minister to these people because he is a good guy. He stays because God has supernaturally gifted him to love these people who have hated him. What was in his heart? I go back to a section in Matthew 9 that reveals the shepherd’s heart:

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

If we are going to lament, we need to give up the idea that we need to get over our losses as quickly as possible. Our faulty thinking goes like this: “If I can learn the right coping skills, follow these 10 steps, pull this lever, push that button, then my pain will go away in no time.” Biblical laments answer our modern ideals with great pessimism. Jeremiah calls purveyors of quick healing quacks and fakes. He rejects superficial solutions. He insists that we take the past seriously. Excavate it. Learn from it. First things first. Weeping then joy. Death then resurrection.

That is the way of the Good Shepherd. He welcomes honesty. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). The Greek verb translated as “mourn” suggests contrition over sin, a sorrow that begins in the heart, takes possession of the entire person, and is outwardly manifested. This is far from superficial and sentimental sorrow. The only healthy way to address pain is to go through it as the psalmist proclaimed: “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death….” David walked through. Jeremiah walked through. The apostles walked through. We all trudge through the valley of the shadow of death.

But we walk through that valley with a sure and certain knowledge that the Lord Jesus Christ walked through before us. He suffered once for all time all the sins of his people. He shed his blood to wash away our sins. He paid the price for humanity’s having broken God’s covenant of works and announced that payment with the cry, “It has been finished!”

One day Christ will return and bring with him the new Jerusalem, the eternal city, which will never be shaken nor assaulted. John the Revelator writes:

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” 

5 And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6 And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. 7 The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. 8 But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”