Episode 336: Pete Enns - Pete Ruins Everything on Lamentations
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete explores the book of Lamentations and what it can teach us about faith in the midst of suffering. He examines the book’s historical setting in the aftermath of Jerusalem’s destruction, its raw and unsettling portrayals of grief, anger, and God’s apparent absence, and the ways its carefully structured poetry gives shape to experiences of trauma and loss. He also considers how Lamentations challenges modern Christian assumptions that faith requires certainty, optimism, or resolution. Together, these themes invite listeners to see lament not as a failure of faith, but as a deeply faithful way of remaining in relationship with God when life falls apart.
Mentioned in This Episode
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Pete: This is Pete Ruins Everything where assumptions come to die and nobody leaves happy. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: For centuries, the story of Eve has been used to say something about women: that they are more easily deceived, less trustworthy, or even responsible for humanity’s downfall. But is that really what the story says?
Pete: In our September class, taught by friend of the podcast Ciarra Jones, we’re going to talk about Eve. What does the Bible actually say and how have interpretations of Eve shaped the way women have been understood and treated over the centuries?
Jared: Ciarra, or as many know her, “CJ”, is going to cover topics like: where the "fall" narrative actually comes from, how centuries of interpretation have turned Eve into a symbol of deception, blame, and untrustworthiness, and why this is relevant for today: like how this has impacted how women are treated, even in the present and what changes when we approach the story through other lenses?
Pete: The class is taking place on Wednesday, September 30th from 8-9:30pm ET. Go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/eve to sign up today! As always, the class will be recorded so you can watch it back later if you can’t make it to the live session. The cost is Pay What You Can: 1, 5, 10, 15, or 25 dollars until the class ends. Or even better, join our online community, the Society of Normal People for $12/month to get all of our classes at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Pete: Hey, everybody! Today, we’re looking at the book of Lamentations, which is not exactly a feel-good book of the Bible. Except for maybe one verse, nobody puts Lamentations on a coffee mug. Nobody cross-stitches “how lonely sits the city” and hangs it in the guest bathroom. But that’s exactly why Lamentations is worthy of our adult attention, so let’s look at what this book is doing.
This book has a crucial role for the spiritual life. It reminds us that sorrow, confusion, protest and even anger have place within the life of faith. The question is not whether we will suffer, the question is whether we will have the language to bring that suffering to God when it comes.
Lamentations is a short book -just five chapters. Each chapter a poem in its own right and written in the aftermath of the great trauma of Israel’s ancient history, the sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The sacred city, God’s city, has fallen. The temple, God’s holy dwelling place, has been destroyed. And the monarchy is over. Loss of land, temple and king, the very things that made Israel, Israel, are all gone. People have been killed, displaced, starved, humiliated, and exiled. And the big theological question hanging over all of this is: what do you do when the world that gave your faith meaning has collapsed? And I wonder how many of us can relate to that in today’s world.
Well, Lamentations does not explain the suffering. It does not give us a neat answer for why terrible things happen. It does not say here are the three spiritual principles for getting through your grief. It doesn’t offer platitudes or cheap feel-good advice. Lamentations is not interested in blunting the suffering. It is interested in telling the truth about suffering.
And the truth the Bible speaks is uncomfortable. Sometimes God seems absent. Sometimes God seems like the enemy. Sometimes the poet hopes, but sometimes the poet can’t hope at all. Sometimes the people confess sin. Sometimes they simply cry out because the pain is too much. Lamentations is one of the most honest books in the Bible. It gives us language for faith, when faith has run out of familiar answers. It shows us that grief, protest, confusion, even anger, are not failures of faith to be hidden under a rock. All of these are normal expressions of faith that inevitably show themself.
So, in this episode, we’re going to talk about what Lamentations is and other things that we usually cover in these episodes like how the book was put together, some of the historical and academic issues scholars talk about. We’ll look at a few key passages and then, finally, why this ancient book of grief still has something to say for how people of faith today think about God. Think about suffering and about our own existence.
So, let’s begin with a 30,000 foot chapter by chapter fly over of the book to get a sense of things. The first thing readers notice right at the beginning is that Jerusalem is portrayed as a woman, more specifically she is a widow. The chapter opens with the lines “how lonely sits the city that was once full of people”. The city that was once bustling with life, commerce, worship and celebration now sits abandoned and devastated.
Throughout this first chapter, Jerusalem, the city speaks as a grieving woman who has lost everything. Her friends have deserted her. Her children are gone. Her dignity has been stripped away. The imagery is emotional, personal and relentless. And, one thing worth noticing is the movement back and forth between the different voices. Sometimes, an observer describes Jerusalem’s suffering. Sometimes Jerusalem speaks for herself. The effect is almost cinematic. We see the city’s suffering from the outside, and then suddenly we hear her own voice from the inside.
What’s striking is that the chapter doesn’t spend much time explaining why this happened. Yes, there are references to sin and judgment, but the emphasis is not on causes. The emphasis is on the loss itself. The poet wants us to sit with the devastation rather than rush to explain it.
And that’s a key theme for the entire book. We often approach suffering as a puzzle to solve. Why did this happen? What lesson should we learn? What is God trying to teach us? All that is fine, but Lamentations isn’t interested in any of those questions yet.
Its first instinct is simply to bear witness. Look at this. See what has happened. Don’t look away. One of the most powerful moments comes in verse 12, where Jerusalem cries out: “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?” Why aren’t you grieving as you should be? Don’t you see how cataclysmic this is?
Before there can be explanations, there must be acknowledgment. Before there can be theology, there must be grief. Before there can be answers, there must be someone willing to hear the lament.
Chapter 1 is an invitation to witness suffering without immediately trying to fix it. If Chapter 1 asks us to witness suffering, Chapter 2 asks an even more disturbing question: What if God is responsible for all this? This is probably the most difficult chapter in the entire book.
In Chapter 1, Jerusalem mourns her losses. In Chapter 2, the poet turns his attention to the one who stands behind those losses. Again and again, the subject of the verbs is God.
The Lord has destroyed. The Lord has cut down. The Lord has rejected. The Lord has torn down. The poet doesn’t portray Jerusalem’s fall as simply a political military defeat. He sees the catastrophe as an act of divine judgment.
Now before we rush in to defend God or explain this away, we should remember what we’re reading. We are listening to traumatized people trying to make sense of an unimaginable disaster. The temple—the very place where God’s presence was believed to dwell—lies in ruins. The Davidic monarchy, which carried God’s promises, has collapsed. The theological world these people inhabited has come crashing down. And so the poet reaches for the only explanation he can imagine: God did this.
What’s fascinating is that even as the poet insists that God is responsible, he doesn’t sound settled or satisfied by that conclusion. There is no sense of theological triumph here. No “lesson learned.” No confidence that everything now makes sense.
Instead, the chapter is filled with anguish. In fact, one of the most striking features of Chapter 2 is that God is described almost as an enemy. The Lord is portrayed as attacking God’s own people, tearing down their defenses, withdrawing protection, and allowing devastation to spread through the land.
That kind of language can make many modern Christians uncomfortable. We often feel the need to soften it or explain it away. But Lamentations refuses to do that. The book allows faithful people to speak honestly about God in moments of profound suffering. Sometimes God feels close. Sometimes God feels absent. And sometimes God feels like the source of the pain itself.
Whether we agree with the poet’s theology isn’t really the point. The point is that the Bible preserves this voice. The voice is not censored. It doesn’t tell suffering people to clean up their language before speaking to God.
The chapter ends with a desperate plea. The people cry out to God, asking God to look, to see, to pay attention. And that’s the irony running through this chapter. The God who is accused is also the God being addressed. The relationship has not ended. The people are angry. They are devastated. They are confused. But they are still talking to God. And that, as we’ll see throughout Lamentations, may be one of the deepest expressions of faith in the entire Bible.
If Chapter 2 is the emotional low point of the book, Chapter 3 feels at first like a turning point. This is the longest chapter in Lamentations and the most famous. It’s also the chapter that contains verses many Christians know by heart: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
Those verses have inspired hymns, sermons, devotionals, and countless moments of comfort. But to understand their power, we have to see them in context.
The chapter begins with a first-person voice: “I am the man who has seen affliction.” The speaker says God has driven him into darkness, turned against him, walled him in, weighed him down, and shattered his peace. The imagery is intense and unrelenting. For nearly half the chapter, we are immersed in despair.
Then comes a shift. “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.” Notice what happens here. The speaker does not suddenly discover an explanation for suffering. He does not receive a vision. God does not speak. The circumstances have not changed.
What changes is what the speaker chooses to remember. He remembers God’s steadfast love. He remembers God’s faithfulness. He remembers traditions that have sustained Israel for generations. Hope emerges not because the situation improves but because memory interrupts despair.
And yet the chapter does not stay in that hopeful tone. Many readers stop at this verse and miss what comes next. The speaker returns to questions, complaints, and uncertainty. God remains silent. The suffering remains real. The chapter never resolves the tension between hope and anguish.
In other words, Chapter 3 is not the moment when the clouds part and everything becomes clear. It’s something much more realistic. It is a portrait of faith that moves back and forth between despair and hope, sometimes within a few verses of each other.
The speaker refuses to surrender either side of the experience. He refuses to deny the pain, but he also refuses to let the pain have the final word.
Maybe this is why the chapter has resonated with so many people through the centuries. Most of us don’t experience suffering as a straight line from despair to healing. We have good days and bad days. Moments of confidence and moments of doubt all mixed together. Times when faith feels alive and times when it feels impossible.
Chapter 3 captures that reality. It doesn’t offer certainty. It offers persistence. The speaker continues the conversation with God even when God seems absent, and he continues to remember hope even when hope feels at best fragile. That balance—between lament and hope, protest and trust—is the beating heart of the book.
If Chapter 3 gives us the book’s closest approach to hope, Chapter 4 pulls us fully back into the wreckage. But unlike the first two chapters, which focus on the immediate experience of suffering, Chapter 4 is largely about a longing for what was. The poet looks back and compares what Jerusalem once was with what it has become.
Here we encounter painful contrasts. The people who once lived in luxury now search for scraps of food. Those who wore fine garments sit among the ashes. The city’s leaders have been brought low. Its children suffer from hunger. Everything that once symbolized stability, prosperity, and divine favor has disappeared.
The chapter is built around a question: How did things get this bad? And one answer the poet gives is that catastrophe did not arrive all at once. Beneath the military defeat lies a deeper story of national failure. The poet points particularly to the failures of leaders—prophets, priests, and rulers—who helped create the conditions that led to disaster.
This is one of the ways Chapter 4 differs from the earlier chapters. It spends less time describing the event itself and more time reflecting on what it reveals. The destruction of Jerusalem has exposed truths that were easier to ignore when things were going well.
Success can hide a lot. Prosperity can conceal weaknesses. Institutions can appear strong right up until the moment they collapse. Only afterward do people begin asking questions they should perhaps have asked much earlier. What were we building our lives on? What assumptions did we never challenge? What warning signs did we ignore? In that sense, Chapter 4 is not only about Jerusalem. It’s about the unsettling clarity that often comes after loss.
The chapter also continues one of the book’s central themes: the reversal of fortunes. Those who seemed secure are vulnerable. Those who seemed powerful are helpless. The world the people thought they understood has been turned upside down. This might remind us a bit of the Beatitudes in Matthew.
By the end of the chapter, there is little sense that recovery is near. The poet remains surrounded by the consequences of the disaster. The shock has worn off, but the pain remains. And that gives Chapter 4 its distinctive voice within the book. Chapter 1 mourns. Chapter 2 accuses. Chapter 3 struggles toward hope. Chapter 4 reflects. It looks back over the ruins and asks what the ruins might be trying to teach us about ourselves.
The final chapter of Lamentations is different still. The earlier chapters are carefully structured acrostic poems [each successive line begins with the successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet—a very ordered structure—try writing a poem sometime that makes sense and that follows the alphabet]. Chapter 5 still has twenty-two verses, corresponding to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, but the acrostic pattern disappears.
Many scholars have wondered whether that is intentional. And while we can’t know for certain, it sure feels like it to me. The book that began by imposing poetic order on chaos now ends with the poetic structure itself unravelling.
Not only that, but the voice changes. The first chapters moved between observers, the city personified as a woman, and an individual sufferer. But Chapter 5 is a communal prayer.
Remember us. Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers. We are orphans. We labor and find no rest. The people are no longer describing their suffering. Now they are bringing it directly before God.
Let’s not jump over this too quickly. Throughout the book there has been an ongoing tension. Is God absent? Is God the source of the suffering? Is God listening? Those questions are never answered. But the people continue to pray anyway.
In fact, one of the remarkable features of Lamentations is that the lament itself becomes a form of faith. The people have lost confidence in many things, but they have not stopped speaking to God—even if “speaking” to God involves accusations, anger, and despair. They have not stopped demanding that God pay attention.
Then we come to the book’s final verses, among the most powerful endings in the entire Bible: “Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old— unless you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure.”
That’s an astonishing way to end a biblical book. There is no resolution. The city is not rebuilt. The exile is not over. God does not answer. The prayer hangs in the air.
In fact, one might understand the ending as a question hovering over everything that has come before. Will God restore the people—or has God finally rejected them?
Churchy readers expect a conclusion. We want the final chapter to tie things together, to reassure us, to tell us how the story ends. Lamentations will have none of that. Cheap explanations cheapen the suffering. The people living through these events didn’t know how the story would end. They were still in the middle of it. That is worth dwelling on for a moment.
Faith does not always live on the far side of resolution. Sometimes faith lives IN the unanswered prayer. Sometimes faith consists of bringing our grief, confusion, uncertainty, our dismay, our anger before God and leaving them there.
Lamentations ends where many of us find ourselves at various points in life—not with certainty, but with a plea. Not with answers, but with hope fragile enough to coexist with doubt. The deepest moments of faith occur not when everything makes sense, but when we continue the conversation with God even when it doesn’t.
Now, let’s look at some academic issues with the book. One of the first questions biblical scholars ask is: When was it written? The short answer is that most scholars date the book—or at least the core of it—to the period immediately following the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.
Now, like most biblical books, Lamentations doesn’t come with a date stamped on the cover. The book never tells us who wrote it or exactly when. So scholars have to piece together clues from the text itself. And the strongest clue is the vividness of the descriptions.
The poems don’t read like distant recollections written centuries later. They read like the testimony of people still living in the aftermath of the catastrophe. The destruction of Jerusalem, the burning of the temple, the starvation during the siege, the humiliation of the population—all of it feels immediate and raw.
The poet isn’t looking back nostalgically on a long-ago event. He sounds like someone still standing amid the rubble.
A second clue is what the book doesn’t mention. At no point do we hear about a return from exile, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, or the restoration of the temple. Those events would come decades later. The horizon of the book is still entirely dominated by loss and uncertainty. The disaster has happened, but recovery remains unimaginable. That strongly suggests a date relatively close to the events themselves.
A third clue, related to all this, is the emotional tone of the book. Books like Deuteronomy, Kings, and later prophetic writings tend to try make sense of the suffering by placing the exile within a carefully worked out theological framework. Lamentations certainly knows the language of judgment, but its dominant mood is shock. The wound is still fresh. The people have not yet moved from grief to interpretation. Taken together, these clues have led most scholars to place the composition of the poems sometime in the late sixth century BCE, likely within a generation of Jerusalem’s fall and perhaps much sooner.
Now that doesn’t mean the book was written all at once. Some scholars think the five poems may have circulated independently before being collected into a single book.
Others suggest later editing and shaping. But even those scholars generally agree that the poems themselves arise from the traumatic events surrounding 586 BCE.
In other words, when we read Lamentations, we are not reading a detached historical reflection. We are listening to voices emerging from one of the greatest crises in Israel’s history, voices trying to find words for what has happened.
The next question is authorship. And here we run into one of the most persistent traditions surrounding the book.
For centuries, both Jewish and Christian readers listed the prophet Jeremiah as the author. If you’ve ever opened an older Bible, you may have seen a heading like “The Lamentations of Jeremiah.” The connection makes a certain amount of sense. Jeremiah lived through the destruction of Jerusalem. He warned that judgment was coming. He witnessed the catastrophe firsthand. So who better to write a book of lament over the city’s fall?
The problem, of course, is that the book is anonymous—like every other book of the HB. Even though it is on one level plausible to say that Jeremiah had a hand in producing this book, we simply don’t know. Most modern scholars therefore do not think we can confidently attribute the book to Jeremiah.
For one thing, the language and perspective of the poems don’t line up well with what we see in the book of Jeremiah. More importantly, the five chapters do not sound as though they were all written by a single person. They employ different voices, different tones, perspectives. That alone doesn’t mean Jeremiah couldn’t have written part of it. It simply means the evidence isn’t strong enough to assert that claim.
And in some ways, the anonymity of the book may actually be part of its power, rather than a problem we may have to solve. Unlike Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel, Lamentations doesn’t present us with the voice of a famous prophet. Instead, it sounds more like the collective voice of a traumatized community. The focus is not on the authority of a particular individual but on the experience of suffering itself. And that, to me, is another significant point to bring up about authorship.
I should also bring up here something many readers may not notice: Lamentations occupies different locations in the Jewish and Christian canons. In Christian Bibles, Lamentations typically follows the book of Jeremiah. The logic is straightforward. If Jeremiah wrote Lamentations—or was at least closely associated with it—then placing the book immediately after Jeremiah makes sense. The prophet warns Jerusalem of coming judgment in the book that bears his name, and then mourns Jerusalem’s destruction in Lamentations.
In the Jewish canon, however, the book is located elsewhere, not part of the Prophets but part of the Writings-ketuvim- the third major division of the Hebrew Bible. More specifically, it belongs to a collection within the Writings (Ketuvim) known as the Five Scrolls, or Megilloth. Lamentations appears here alongside other anonymous books, like Song of Songs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, and Esther.
That placement tells us something about how this book is seen in Judaism. Rather than being primarily an extension of Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry, Lamentations, like the other 4 books of the Megilloth, is treated as sacred poetry and a source of communal liturgy and sorrow.
In Jewish tradition, the book is read annually on Tisha B’Av, a day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples (AD 70). In other words, the book did not remain simply a reflection on one historical tragedy. It got expanded and became a resource for remembering suffering across generations. Lamentations lives beyond what happened in 586 BCE. Later communities appropriated the language for their own losses, their own catastrophes, and their own unanswered questions. All this is to say that maybe the authorship of the book is not the most important thing to think about in this book.
That brings us to another issue, the structure of the book, which is one of its most fascinating features. Scholars have long admired not only the emotional power of Lamentations but also its remarkable literary artistry. In particular, F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp (Chip, Princeton) has shown how carefully crafted these poems are, reminding us that profound grief and exquisite poetry are not opposites. Indeed, poetry may be the best mode of media for recording grief.
As I mentioned, four of the five chapters are alphabetic acrostics--the verses are arranged according to the order of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter 1 runs us through the Hebrew alphabet, as does ch. 2. Chapter 4 does the same. Chapter 3 takes the pattern even further, devoting three verses to each letter of the alphabet.
For modern readers, that may sound like a literary flourish. But it raises a question: Why would someone create such highly structured poetry in response to a catastrophe? After all, grief feels chaotic. Trauma feels disorienting. Why impose such rigid order on an experience defined by disorder?
That question cannot be easily answered, but many scholars think the structure itself is somehow part of the message. Adele Berlin, for example, one of the leading literary interpreters of Lamentations, argues that the structure of these poems may itself be part of how grief is being processed. The acrostic form gives shape to suffering. The poet cannot control events, but he can still speak of it in a controlled way. He can still create. He can still move from A to Z—from aleph to tav—even when everything else has fallen apart.
Others suggest the alphabetic structure symbolizes completeness. The poet is lamenting from beginning to end, expressing the fullness of grief, as though every letter of the alphabet must be enlisted to tell the story. Whatever the original intention, the effect is striking. The poems are emotionally raw, but they are also artistically disciplined. Passion and structure exist side by side.
The poets of Lamentations are not losing control. They are finding a way to speak honestly about suffering without being consumed by it. Even their poetry becomes an act of survival.
Related to this literary feature of the book is another important scholarly conversation I want to drop in here: concerning its literary genre. As F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp has pointed out, Lamentations belongs to a much broader ancient Near Eastern tradition of city laments—poems written after the destruction of great cities. Israel wasn’t inventing city collapse laments from scratch. But what makes Lamentations distinctive is that its grief is directed toward Israel’s own covenant God. The poems are not simply mourning a ruined city; they are wrestling with what that ruin means for faith itself.
So far we’ve looked at the contents of the book, its historical setting, its composition, and its place within Israel’s tradition of lament. But what have scholars actually been talking about in recent decades?
Many of the questions occupying scholars today concern what this book is doing, how it works, and why it continues to speak so powerfully to readers 2500 years later. One of the biggest conversations concerns trauma; some scholars today read Lamentations through the lens of contemporary trauma studies. Much of that conversation has been shaped by the work of Kathleen O’Connor, who has argued that Lamentations is best understood as the voice of a community struggling to live through collective trauma rather than simply explaining it. After all, the destruction of Jerusalem was the collapse of an entire world—temple, land, monarchy. The social order was shattered. The theological assumptions that had sustained the people for generations suddenly evaporated.
A second major discussion is one we’ve touched on already: the portrayal of God in the book. As we’ve seen, esp. in ch. 2, we have here a biblical book that repeatedly portrays God as the source of the suffering. What do we do with that?
For some scholars, this is evidence that the book functions as a form of protest. For others, it demonstrates the extraordinary honesty of biblical faith. The poets are not suppressing their experience. They are expressing it directly, even when that expression is uncomfortable.
A third area of discussion has emerged from feminist scholarship, particularly around a figure in the book known, the Daughter Zion. Throughout the book, Jerusalem is portrayed as a woman—a widow, a mother, a daughter, a victim of violence and humiliation. Some scholars see these images as powerful and moving. By personifying the city as a suffering woman, the poems create a deeply emotional portrait of loss and vulnerability.
Carleen Mandolfo, for example, has explored how the figure of Daughter Zion both gives voice to suffering and raises difficult questions about gender, violence, and whose pain is being represented. What happens when the pain of women becomes a metaphor for national tragedy? Are there dimensions of violence in the text that modern readers need to confront more directly?
These discussions have generated a great deal of important scholarship, precisely by taking the language of Lamentations seriously and asking how it shapes our understanding of suffering, gender, and power.
Finally, many scholars have become interested in lament itself as a spiritual practice.
Afterall, why preserve a book like this? Why include it in Scripture? Why did this book make the cut? Why read it year after year in Jewish communities and continue to study it in Christian communities?
One answer is that lament performs an essential religious function. And here, Walter Brueggemann’s work has been especially influential. He long argued that biblical faith includes seasons of what he calls disorientation, and lament is the language God’s people need during those seasons. Rather than pretending everything is fine, lament becomes an act of faith precisely because it expresses authenticity and honesty before God.
Lament allows people to tell the truth about suffering. It creates space for grief. Rather than collapsing into denial or premature answers. And perhaps most importantly, it provides a way to actually remain in relationship with God when that relationship feels strained, confused, or even broken.
Seen this way, Lamentations is a model for what faith can look like when life falls apart.
Which brings us to perhaps the most important question of all: What might this ancient book have to say to us today?
So, before we wrap up, I’d like to spend a few minutes thinking about Lamentations through a Christian lens. And I want to begin with something that is very true in my experience and which has been a theme throughout this episode: Lamentations reminds us of what much of modern western Christianity has forgotten, that lament is not a failure of faith.
In my experience, many Christians have been taught—explicitly or implicitly—that faith means confidence, certainty, assurance, and victory. We are encouraged to trust, persevere, overcome, and move forward. None of those things are wrong. But when those become the only spiritual notes we know how to play, something vital to faith gets lost.
The Bible is filled with lament. The Psalms are filled with lament. Job is a lament. The prophets lament. And here in Lamentations we find an entire biblical book devoted to grief. Again, not grief quickly resolved. Not grief explained. Just grief.
The book reminds us that sorrow, confusion, protest, and even anger have a place within the life of faith. The question is not whether we will suffer. The question is whether we will have the language to bring that suffering before God when it comes.
And that leads to Jesus. One reason Christians have continued to find Lamentations meaningful is that Jesus himself stands firmly within Israel’s tradition of lament.
He weeps over Jerusalem. He weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. And perhaps most famously, from the cross he cries out the opening words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not suppress his anguish. He does not pretend that suffering isn’t real. He does not bypass lament on his way to resurrection. The Christian story does not eliminate lament. It passes directly through it.
In fact, that brings us to what may be the most powerful Christian way of thinking about this book. Lamentations is a book for Holy Saturday.
Christians tend to focus on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We focus on suffering and death and then on resurrection. But Holy Saturday is the day in between. The catastrophe has happened. The stone has not yet been rolled away. God seems silent. The future is dark and uncertain.
Nothing makes sense yet. And if we’re honest, much of life is lived there in that space. Most of us spend very little time in Easter certainty. We spend much more time in Holy Saturday uncertainty. Waiting. Wondering. Hoping. Questioning. Trying to remain faithful when we cannot see how the story ends. That is precisely where Lamentations lives. And perhaps that is why the book remains so relevant.
Lamentations offers Christians a faith that does not always require resolution. The book ends unfinished, and yet the conversation continues. As I mentioned earlier, the people of the exile refuse to surrender the relationship, even when the relationship itself feels strained beyond repair.
Lamentations reminds us that sometimes faith is persistence, of remaining in the conversation when no satisfying answers are available.
So what do we do with a book like Lamentations? For me, one of its greatest gifts is a sense of solidarity with the Christian tradition precisely when I’m hanging on.
Many of us inherit versions of Christianity that leave little room for those unsettling experiences. We feel pressure to snap back quickly to certainty, optimism, and being composed. Lamentations reminds us that the Bible itself is often far less tidy than the theologies we have been taught.
The book also reminds us that suffering is not always a problem to be solved. Some of life’s deepest wounds resist explanation. The death of a child. The collapse of a marriage. A devastating diagnosis. The loss of a community. The end of a dream.
Answers are slow in coming. What we need instead is language. To remain present to our suffering without being destroyed by it. Thank you, Lamentations.
The book also assumes something remarkable about God, which I think I have left buried until this point, but it may be the single most liberating thought we can take from the book. It assumes God can handle our lament. The poets accuse God. Question God. Argue with God. Demand answers from God. And Scripture preserves those prayers rather than censoring them. Go Bible!
Perhaps God prefers an honest relationship to a polite one. Maybe we are not meant to hold our emotional lives at bay. The opposite of faith is not lament, disengagement by offering simplistic answers.
The deepest lesson of Lamentations is: Stay. Stay in the conversation. Stay in the prayer. Stay in the relationship. Even when nothing makes sense. Even when certainty vanishes. Even when all you have left are questions.
Lamentations is not on most people’s top ten Bible book list. That’s unfortunate, because it may also be one of the most necessary. In a religious culture such as we have now in America, obsessed with certainty, solutions, and positivity, Lamentations offers a different kind of wisdom. The wisdom of discovering that faith can survive even when certainty does not. This ancient book certainly has a lot to say to our current moment.
Alright, folks, well thank you for being here again, and I hope to see you all again next time!
Pete: Hey! Before you go, we hear from a lot of listeners that sitting with questions that you can’t take to your pastor, parents or friends can be alienating and a lonely experience.
Jared: And, if that’s you, we’ve built a place for that. It’s called the Society of Normal People. It’s a community of people who are in exactly that spot –curious, maybe a little displaced, but definitely not done thinking about God and the Bible.
Pete: We’re not promising it will answer your questions. Alas, even we can’t answer all of the questions, but it’s a lot less lonely when you’re asking them with people who get it.
Jared: Head to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join to learn more or just head to the link in the show notes. We’d love to see you there!
