From Darkness To Light, From Sorrow To Hope: Lessons From Jeremiah And LamentationsSample

"New Years Day: Five Laments, Epilogue I"

For all its pathos, Lamentations is not an emotional outburst. It is a collection of elegies, or formal poems written for a funeral. Each of the five chapters in Lamentations is a complete poem in itself. This elaborate artistry communicates something important about the writer’s purpose. These poems are not simply cries from the heart, although they certainly are that. Properly understood, the book of Lamentations is a theodicy, an attempt to reflect on the meaning of human suffering and to explain the ways of God to humanity. 

In a world of overwhelming human suffering, Lamentations give voice to the deepest agonies of grief, with the hope that some comfort may come through crying out to God for mercy. The first lament opens with Jerusalem’s response to her sad predicament: “Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are on her cheeks” (1:2a). Jerusalem had been betrayed by her allies, especially Egypt. Many of her inhabitants had been sent into exile in Babylon. The reason for the city’s defeat, and thus for her sorrow, was not hard to find. It was the result of Judah’s sin. 

Jeremiah’s second lament recounts many of the same calamities as the first. There is something healthy about this. Healing comes through memory, not forgetfulness, and a vital part of the grieving process is honestly confronting what has been lost. The second lament thus deals with a particular kind of sorrow—the sorrow that comes from remembering the days that are no more. Late in the second lament, Jeremiah’s sufferings are turned into intercession. The prayer at the end is of someone suffering a crisis of faith because he has witnessed unspeakable horrors, of someone who has no answers, only questions. 

The third lament begins with the pronoun “I.” It is personal rather than communal. While some think it is intended to come from the mouth of Jerusalem, it is better understood as coming from the mouth of Jeremiah. This is a reminder that suffering is always personal. here were times when all his sufferings tempted Jeremiah to become bitter. Yet toward the end of the third lament, there seems to have been a change in the prophet’s melancholy mood. 

What he wrote were the words of a survivor, of a man who has suffered great evil without abandoning his confidence in God’s faithfulness: 

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning:

great is your faithfulness (vv. 22-23).