Once is Not Enough
Lamentations and the problem of pain
As we saw in the first of this series A Container for Sorrow, Lamentations uses the form of an acrostic to contain the whirlpool of thoughts and emotions that threaten to suck us down into despair.
Intensification
Jeremiah writes verse by verse from Aleph to Tav, cataloging the pain of the destruction of Jerusalem in chapter one. But one time through the alphabet does not contain it all. His grief continues. So it is with grief. There is no set verse that we can recite to make the pain go away.
Last year as my son went through two brain surgeries and my father died, well-meaning friends would send us “encouraging” verses. You know them well, the ones that reassure us that all things work together for good, that God has a plan, that He will send us His peace and bear our burdens. Of course I know them well too. I have been preaching them and praying them and sharing them with those who are hurting as well.
They are true. And yet in the midst of our anguish and sorrow they held no power to stop the pain. If anything they made us all the more aware of God’s silence and the absence of any sense of His presence. We know God’s goodness. We know God’s all mighty power. In the midst of unbearable suffering that is exactly the problem.
In chapter two Jeremiah starts again at the top with Aleph and once more trudges through his catalog, turning pain this way and that so that no nuance of it is missed. Grief is noticing through absence things that were important to us. When we lost my father we were grieving his passing. His absence at the table, in his chair, in his shop. But as the grief process continues we are not just noticing his absence, the large empty space where he used to be. We are noticing jokes left unsaid, prayers he would have offered, advice we would have turned to him to ask.
Jeremiah this time through the alphabet spends the first nine letters turning around the attacks of the enemy that left Jerusalem devastated that he had gone through so carefully in the first chapter. This time he notices something else. This time it is not the enemy. With each new letter it is the LORD. He is the one who without pity destroys every structure from strongholds to homes, from to princes and kings to children. Just as completely the LORD also destroys the sanctuary, the assembly, the feasts. There is no distinction made at all between the secular and the sacred.
The question lingering behind Jeremiah’s acrostic is the classic paradox that has been called the problem of pain. If God is all powerful and God is good, then why is there suffering? Why are we God’s servants suffering?
Deconstruction
The next seven verses focus on Jerusalem and Jeremiah himself. Jeremiah is narrating God as conducting an ancient version of what Jacques Derrida called “deconstruction.” The postmodern French philosopher looked deeper behind the surface to discover conflicting meanings.
Jerusalem had built up a surface structure that she was privileged because of the covenant. God had made promises and chosen her. Her temple was God’s dwelling place on earth. Her elders were expert in God’s law. Her beauty was beyond compare. For an enemy to defeat her was considered impossible because after all God was on her side.
Now her elders, the ones who always had the answers, sit silent. Her virgins, the ones whose hope sprung eternal, have their heads bowed low in despair. Her prophets, the ones who should have pointed her back to the LORD, were in fact covering over her sin and deceiving her. Even Jeremiah has no words of consolation.
Jeremiah does not allow false comfort. He does not give them an easy resolution to the problem of pain. Instead he strips away everything that they thought was real but was in actuality not. This is the postmodern agenda, pointing out the holes, the imbalance, the difference between the grand narratives we tell ourselves make sense of our world and its bankruptcy.
Patience
This is where Jeremiah parts company with Derrida. Where postmodern thought leads to the conclusion that the problem of pain simply exposes the illegitimacy of the idea of a good and all powerful God, Jeremiah deconstructs everything else but God. He is left with the awful realization that the God of the covenant is doing exactly what He had promised He would do.1
Leviticus and Deuteronomy both end with grave warnings that if Israel did not keep the commandments that the LORD would cause them to suffer defeat and be ruled over by foreign nations. The LORD has not changed. He is still all powerful destroying Jerusalem completely. He is still good. He is keeping the promises that He made. He cannot “curse God and die” as Job’s wife suggests because this is not God’s fault. The Israelites have brought this down upon themselves.
The only course of action is to “cry out in the night” for the sake of their children. Jeremiah prays to the LORD, the one who shown no mercy, confronting God in the same manner as Moses.2 God suggests to Moses that he would destroy the Israelites, after they worshiped the golden calf, and start over with him. Moses prays appealing to God’s character, His promises, His reputation. Jeremiah prays, “See, O Lord” asking if mothers should have to eat the very children they cuddled or if His priests and prophets should have to die in the LORD’s sanctuary. In essence he is asking God if His judgment has been too severe.
The ultimate example of the problem of pain is seen in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Here we see the all powerful God, the one who can darken the sun and cause the earth to quake. Here too is the good God who so loves the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Finally, here too is pain as the Lamb of God dies a horrible painful death. All three elements are there in unbearable tension.
In the moment, the problem of pain is unresolvable. It defies any easy explanation. It refuses to be comforted. Jeremiah sits weeping, with everything he thought was real stripped away. It has all been a lie. The temple, the feasts, the sacrifices, the altar, all destroyed. Yet Jeremiah when all of the foundations are shaking will not let go of what he knows is real. Jeremiah continues to hold on to the God who makes and keeps His promises.
On the way to the cross Jesus told His disciples that on the third day He would rise again.3 He told them that He would send them another Comforter.4 He told them He was preparing a place for them.5 At the cross this wasn’t enough. They all fled. They gave up. They despaired. The only solution to the problem of pain is patience. We must hold on to what we do know as everything around us dissolves. Hold on to the God who makes promises and keeps His covenant. The third day is coming. The Comforter will come. There will be a new heaven and a new earth where God will still be on the throne and will still be good, but there will be no more pain, nor sorrow, nor death.
Leviticus 26:14-17
Exodus 32
Luke 18:33
John 14:16 KJV
John 14:2