A Liturgy of Grief

A Pastoral Commentary on Lamentations

Allen, Leslie C.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441237538
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

In Lamentations, we read of the unbearable grief experienced by a group of believers. Leslie Allen suggests the book can be read as the script of a liturgy performed to help the people of God come to terms with the fall of Jerusalem and the national catastrophe it entailed. It reveals God's sometimes hidden support for those who grieve and for their caregivers. In this unique commentary on Lamentations, respected Old Testament scholar and volunteer hospital chaplain Leslie Allen appropriates this oft-neglected book of the Bible to deal with a universal issue. Incorporating stories of pastoral encounters with hospital patients, Allen integrates Scripture and pastoral care to present a biblical model for helping those coping with grief. The book includes a foreword by Nicholas Wolterstorff, author of Lament for a Son.

1

First Poem (Lamentations 1)

Grief, Guilt, and the Need for Prayer (1)

In 71 CE the Roman emperor Vespasian celebrated the conquest of the rebellious province of Judea the previous year. The conquest had included the destruction of the Jerusalem temple after a siege of the city. Vespasian issued a special bronze coin to commemorate the victory. The obverse bore the emperor’s image, while the reverse depicted a woman representing Judea, sitting disconsolate on the ground under an exotic date palm, with her left hand supporting her bowed head. History was strangely repeating itself. More than six centuries earlier, in 586 BCE, the army of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon captured the independence-seeking vassal kingdom of Judah. Jerusalem bore the brunt of the attack and fell after an eighteen-month siege. Life as the Judeans knew it came to an end; many of them were deported. Those left behind grieved, and the five poems of the book of Lamentations are the memento of their grief, with the first two poems portraying a mourning woman, like the one on Vespasian’s coin.

This first poem, like the next one, features in the Hebrew an acrostic structure that uses in turn the twenty-two letters of the alphabet at the start of the first word in each stanza. This artistic device that links stanza to stanza not only reveals the dimensions of the poem but also expresses a totality of suffering and grief, from A to Z as it were. What elsewhere in the poem is indicated by the prevalence of all and by the cry Is there any anguish like my anguish? in the twelfth stanza is more generally conveyed by the methodical, relentless progression through the alphabet. Anyone whose life is filled by grief from horizon to horizon can find fellow feeling here. The metrical structure of the Hebrew poetic lines is also a monument to grief. A significant number of lines reflect a meter of three beats plus two beats, the limping meter used, though not exclusively, for Israel’s funeral dirges.

The poem falls into two halves, each consisting of eleven stanzas. The stanzas have three lines (but four in stanza 7, as in stanza 19 of the second poem). The stanzas do not always turn out to be units of thought, nor do the lines. At times the sense spills over or stops short, both signs of the chaos of grief reacting to loss and change. The first half of the poem reports the grief of a woman who has suffered; at the close she twice interrupts with her own words. The second half is almost the opposite: the woman speaks throughout, except for a third-person report about her that occurs in the middle stanza.

Whereas the woman on Vespasian’s coin represented captured Judea, this woman personifies the fallen capital, Jerusalem. The poem appears to be part of a dramatic liturgy, which the other poems will continue. Here two speakers give expression to the grief of the shocked community evidently gathered on the ruined temple site in Jerusalem. A description of the memorial service held after the 9/11 collapse of the World Trade Center in New York helps to evoke the scene: “Everyone around me wore the same numb look of grief that I wore. We all looked pale and zombie-like, as though we couldn’t quite focus our eyes. . . . To my right I was shocked to see one of the last remaining Trade Center buildings, charred and black. At the street level was a grimy Borders bookstore, dirty posters barely visible through the soot-blackened windows” (Carter 2008, 87–88).

The way the woman addresses Yahweh at the end of the ninth and eleventh stanzas and likewise the reporter in the course of the tenth stanza implies a sacred setting associated with the divine presence, as Rudolph suggested. The descriptions of the woman’s grief and her verbal contributions are intended to let the community members hear their own mental pain brought out into the open and to direct their incoherent thoughts and emotions into helpful channels. Such guidance would assist them eventually to come to terms with the catastrophe that had overwhelmed them.

Human Losses (1:1–6)

There is a lot for readers to digest in this poem, as in the others, and it will be less taxing to present the material in appropriate sections. The first half of this poem seems to subdivide after the sixth stanza. The first six stanzas have their own coherence in terms of multiple social losses that involve different groups of people who had earlier defined Jerusalem’s life; in the next section, material losses are the subject.

¹ How terrible that the city sits alone,

once so great in population size!

It has turned into a widow, as it were,

once so great compared with other nations.

The first lady of the provinces

has turned into a forced laborer.

² She sobs and sobs in the nighttime—

tears rest on her cheeks.

She has no comforter

out of all her former allies.

Her friends all betrayed her,

turning into her enemies.

³ Judah was exiled after enduring affliction

and hard labor;

it now sits among other nations.

It could find “no resting place”;

it was constantly caught

after being chased into tight corners.

⁴ The roads to Zion are in mourning,

now that no pilgrims come for festivals;

all her gates feel devastated.

Her priests groan,

her girls are grieving,

while her own reaction is bitter sorrow.

⁵ Her foes turned out to “be the head,”

her enemies the ones safe and sound.

The reason is that Yahweh himself made her suffer

for her many rebel ways.

Her young children “went away

as prisoners,” driven forward by the foe.

⁶ Moreover, Lady Zion lost

all her majesty.

Her royal officials turned, as it were, into deer

that cannot find pasture

and so run without strength,

chased by the hunter.

In the early stages of grief, a bereaved person can only say, “I miss X so much.” A sympathetic friend may gently coax him or her to put into words what particular attributes or aspects of the lost individual are pined for. Similarly, in this first section of the poem, the grieving community listens as one of their number articulates their grief as he defines their human losses. He details the ones they miss and the roles those persons no longer play. There is an aura of death about these six stanzas. It is not a literal death but rather the cost of losing a variety of social relationships that were so much a part of the community’s identity. Those significant parts of their life died, as it were. This reality is described by Nicholas Wolterstorff, who wrote about burying his son, “I buried myself that warm June day” (1987, 42).

The first word, ekhah in Hebrew, traditionally belonged to the funeral dirge and introduced a contrast between a grim present and a good past, a chasm that bereavement had created. Here too it introduces such contrasts. It is a shriek, a scream, “not the kind of scream that comes from fright, but the kind that comes from the deepest grief imaginable. It is a scream that comes when there are no words to express what you feel. . . . It is a scream that rails against logic and fate and everything there is” (Hood 2008, 139). The Hebrew word is generally translated “how” but is better expanded into How terrible that . . . ! in order to express its emotional intensity. In this case it tells us that the liturgy leader, who here has the role of reporter, is not like a television or radio reporter sent to cover a story and soon to speed away from the scene. He is a member of the mourning community and immersed in the story he tells. His task is to pastorally lead the congregation in giving expression to an overwhelming grief that is equally his own.

In the first line, sits describes a mourning posture. A parallel comes from the experience of Nehemiah, who likewise “sat down and wept. For some days I mourned” (Neh. 1:4). The word alone sets the tone for this section and summarizes it. So many of the social interactions the community had taken for granted were no more. The bustling metropolis was a ghost town, apart from such gatherings as the present one, for many of the people had been deported. It had lost its greatness twice over, since its international political prestige was also a thing of the past. The comparison with a widow has to be understood culturally and sociologically. The word means “a once married woman who has no means of financial support and who is in need of special legal protection.” Applied to a city, this term refers to its economic poverty and struggle for survival (Cohen 1973, 77–78). Nor is this a purely ancient or alien phenomenon. Joyce Brothers, in Widowed, ruefully refers to widows as “among our country’s most oppressed minorities” (1990, 81). Jerusalem’s key role among the provinces may be gauged from its earlier function as a meeting place for the western states to conspire against Babylon (see the historical details in Jer. 27:3). The order in the contrasts, moving twice from negative to positive and then from positive to negative, means that the first stanza is framed by notes of desolation, as Bergant has observed.

Stanza 2 will eventually expand on this latter social loss, the security of alliance with neighboring states. That security had evaporated as those states had been forced by defeat or intimidation into joining Babylon’s side. So Jerusalem had suffered the isolating contrast of enmity after friendship. But this stanza starts with a report of the personified city’s extreme grief. The city has been increasingly personified in the course of the first stanza by the use of simile and metaphor. Her distress is evidenced in sobbing aloud that, knowing no bounds, continues into the night. This is a time when, for other people, silence prevails and restorative sleep can be enjoyed, but paradoxically it is a time that provokes grief by its lack of distracting stimulation. “There is nothing to blunt the edge of sorrow or divert attention from it” (Peake 1911, 302).

Especially moving is the visual detail of tears on the cheeks. The visualization adds to the text a dramatic feature that reminds my chaplain self of a custom in the maternity unit of a hospital. Sometimes you see a card taped to the door of a patient’s room. On the card is a picture of a fallen green leaf, and resting on the leaf is a glistening dewdrop. It is a symbol of grief, warning the staff that the patient has experienced a miscarriage, a fetal death, or a stillborn delivery. The green leaf fallen prematurely from a tree and the tear-like drop of dew convey grief over a lost potential. Here in this poem, the image of tears on a woman’s cheeks gave permission to the hearing congregation to weep and must have made their eyes glisten with their own tears.

Lack of comforters is a somber drumbeat that will be sounded all through the first poem, reflecting the intensity of the grief. Comfort in this poem refers not to the result of bringing about the end of mourning, as in Isaiah 40:1–2, but to the processes of showing emotional identification with those who grieve (Anderson 1991, 84) and of offering positive consolation to them (Olyan 2004, 47–48). Here the lack accentuates the community’s isolation. In Israel’s world, a strong sense of solidarity usually ensured that family and friends would gather round and minister to the mourner by their presence. So, for example, Job’s friends sat on the ground with him in silence for a full week, sharing the numb shock of his initial sorrow (Job 2:13). When bad relationships in the community meant that such comfort was denied and “I have become like a bird alone on a roof,” as one psalmist exclaimed (Ps. 102:7), or “no one cares” (Ps. 142:4; cf. Ps. 69:20), the situation was dire indeed. In this case, the people have lost their former allies, and the political reversal has taken an emotional toll.

The list of major social losses goes on. Nothing can make up for them. The community had suffered large-scale deportation to Babylonia. The repetition of sits from the first stanza is significant, as Hunter (1996, 105) observes. Qualified with among other nations, it spells out the affinity of experience and yet distance between the survivors and the former nation of Judah. Affliction is illustrated by the systematic, ruthless rounding up of deportees (Salters 1986, 87). It sounds uncannily like the way the Nazis herded Jews first into ghettos and then into trains that would travel to unknown eastern destinations. In most cases, the people were never to be seen again.

The ache of such a loss cuts savagely across the grain of a long-settled community. It cries out for reflection, for some attempt at explanation. Did such a calamity make any sense, especially as it was believed that God had given the land to Israel as a place of rest? In this case an interpretation could be offered. It is the beginning of a long process of finding meaning for the calamity, a process that will come to fruition only in the positive developments of the third poem. Upon the hectic scenes of Judeans vainly trying to escape the roundup is superimposed a text that the listening congregation, versed in Scripture, would recognize as one of a series of solemn curses for radical national disobedience of God: Deuteronomy 28:65. This curse pronounced “no repose, no resting place for your foot” but instead a fate of being scattered among other nations. The first half of the poem will be increasingly marked by this spiritual agenda. Its purpose is to foster a spirit of repentance and confession among these prodigal sons and daughters left in the land. We readers are not to interpret the agenda as being an all-inclusive explanation of the suffering of believers, for it stands poles apart from the innocent suffering of Job. But it does raise a flag of accountability. It poses a challenge: that victims of suffering may to a lesser or greater degree be victims of their own bad choices. And yet they must not be tempted by this text to take upon themselves the burden of unrealistic guilt.

Stanza 4 registers another loss and contrast, the termination of happy pilgrimage to the festivals on Judah’s sacred calendar. Zion is here a religious term for Jerusalem as the home of the temple. This term is chosen to fit the new context in this stanza, which now moves away from secular and political perspectives. The empty roads to the desolated shrine and the ruined city gates are personified as themselves in mourning. To grieving eyes, everything around ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: First Poem (Lamentations 1)
• 2: Second Poem (Lamentations 2)
• 3: Third Poem (Lamentations 3)
• 4: Fourth Poem (Lamentations 4)
• 5: Fifth Poem (Lamentations 5)
• Notes on the Translation
• Literature Cited
• Scripture Index