Lament

By Jim Green

Job chapter three is often referred to as “Job’s Lament.” Because in it he laments the day of his birth. But I see the whole book as one long heart breaking lament that is repeatedly interrupted by Job’s friends. Nearly half of the chapters in the book are about Job complaining to God, or to anyone else who will listen, since God seems unavailable.

To lament is to grieve out loud; it is to moan, and weep, and regret, with words and with tears.

The Bible gives us permission to lament. There is even a book called Lamentations. It is five chapters of Jeremiah weeping for his people, five laments where he says things like this: “He has made my teeth grind on gravel and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the LORD.” Lamentations 3:16-18

Who wants to write things like that?

No one.

But prophets are not permitted to be silent about the things with which God confronts them. Good news or grief, joy and sorrow, all must be proclaimed.

Lamentation is a strange language to our American ears. We dare not speak it, and we do not wish to hear it. I don’t blame us because, despite what you may see on the news, we are a cheerful people. That’s a good thing. Optimism is our birthright as a nation, and we are certain that things will always get better. The sun will come out tomorrow.

But this gospel of happiness has bled into our churches. It seems everything is permissible in the American church today, except sadness. It is the new unforgivable sin. If you are anything but relentlessly cheerful you are somehow letting down the team. After all, we wouldn’t want anyone to think that God doesn’t “work.”

Is our theology really that shallow? Is it that light?

The books of Job and Lamentations are in our Bible for a reason. Yet they are the scrolls we dare not read in public, God’s embarrassing children. They are too heavy for our theology of personal happiness. So, we keep them in the shadows to hide them from the public.

If Job were among us today, complaining about God, is this how you treat your friends, and lamenting the day of his birth, we would recoil. We would want to rush him into therapy and demand that he be fixed. “Come on Job,” we might say, “you have been sitting in those ashes for weeks, it’s time to move on. Let’s get you cleaned up and back to work.”

The average American Protestant Sunday morning can often feel like a twenty-minute happy sing-along, followed by a Ted Talk pretending to be a sermon. Our souls remain untouched, our spirits are left dry and thirsty, there is little sacred about it.

In our more ancient liturgical traditions there is at least room for the sacred. There is solemnity. They are not afraid of the silence. There may even be incense. Mourning and grief somehow feels welcomed there. Heaven whispers.

Maybe I am being unfair to our modern churches, but it seems to me that truth, sorrow, death, pain, loss, suffering, life, peace, souls, eternity, Jesus, and the cloud of witnesses; these are all heavy things. It is ok to treat them as such.

The Bible is full of tears, but it is not a sad book, it is just a very real book, because life is filled with tears. The book of Job gives us permission to bring our pain, our doubts, our complaints, and our losses to God, without fear of condemnation. Lamentation is not an act of unbelief, or disobedience; it is an act of faith.

Jesus died lamenting. But He was obedient to the very end.

To perceive is to suffer, according to Aristotle. To be human is to lament. It is the natural, needed, release of emotion when things have gone horribly wrong. I weep, and you weep. We all have our reasons. But our tears are not the enemy in this place. In fact, sometimes, they are the only defense we have against the true enemy. For when wickedness or loss comes and imprisons our hearts, tears are a mercy, a release.

Tears are a gift.

Remember, Jesus wept.

But we must always remember, even in the midst of our doubts and despair, even when our vision is blurred by tears, that truth and beauty are very real things.

In a way, they are the only real things, because they represent all that is eternal. The bewilderment and gloom that confront us are fading. They are weak, and fleeting.

There is a breeze blowing from Heaven today, because her front doors have been left wide open by Christ. This breeze changes everything it touches, pushing back the darkness, softening some hearts while hardening others.

One day soon it will become a mighty rushing wind again.

It will rearrange the furniture here. It will push all that is evil, and corrupt, and dark, off the edge of existence into an abyss from which it will never rise. It will blow away and dissipate the gloom and despair we carry as if it were a mist, like the tattered shreds of a nightmare that we cannot even remember.

In that day you will lay down the weight you have had to carry. The only weight you feel will be the weight of glory. You will run and not be weary, you will walk and not faint. There will be no more lamentation.

At last, you will be light-hearted, forever.