What’s Happening?
Israel has been destroyed by Babylon. The book of Lamentations is a series of five anonymous acrostic poems that lament Babylon's invasion and the ruin of Israel. They are an alphabetical memorial of Jerusalem's sorrows, an A-Z accounting of her devastation.
In chapter 1, Jerusalem is personified as a grieving widow who has fallen from grace, honor, and privilege (Lamentations 1:1). Her friends, husband, and lovers have either abandoned or betrayed her (Lamentations 1:2). Worse, God, who once liberated her from slavery and gave her rest in her own land, has enslaved his bride to hard labor under new foreign masters (Lamentations 1:3). This exile, however, is Lady Jerusalem's fault (Lamentations 1:5). And she knows it.
She remembers all the privileges and gifts that God once gave her—and how, like a thankless bride, she let other lovers and lords "enter" her most sacred place and steal all the precious things God gave (Lamentations 1:7-10). The Babylonians publicly expose Lady Jerusalem for her opportunism, idolatry, and immorality. But naked, she demands that God look at her (Lamentations 1:9b). She wants God to see her destitution (Lamentations 1:11). And she wants all reading to see both her sorrow and the unrelenting ferocity of God's divine justice (Lamentations 1:12-13). Lady Jerusalem accepts her guilt but refuses to accept her suffering as God's final word to her (Lamentations 1:18). She begs God to see her pain and respond with justice against her enemies (Lamentations 1:20-22).
But God does not respond. Instead, a second poem shifts to the perspective of the author, who reiterates that all Jerusalem's sufferings come from God's hand. Twenty-eight verbs are used to describe God's justice. God swallows, breaks, cuts, burns, kills, lays waste, disowns, scorns, and sinks Jerusalem for her atrocities (Lamentations 2:1-9). God's justice is total and Israel is silent in her guilt (Lamentations 2:10).
Breaking the silence, the author weeps for Lady Jerusalem and vomits as he sees the justice, even faithfulness, in God's actions (Lamentations 2:11-17). He begs Jerusalem to end her silence and cry to the same God who has afflicted her, if not for her own sake then for her starving children (Lamentations 2:18-19). Numb, the only prayer Lady Jerusalem can ask is for God to look and consider. She pleads for him to look at the cannibalism mothers have been reduced to, to look at the terror and human cost of God's justice, and to consider if God really desires his judgment to be his last action towards his people (Lamentations 2:20-22).
Where is the Gospel?
The only hope for guilty Israel is that the God who wrote these curses also wrote their limit. Early in Israel's history God entered into a special relationship with her. He promised a kingdom and a land in his presence, and Israel promised to listen to and obey God's laws in return (Exodus 24:7). Israel signed her name to this covenant and accepted a list of consequences, or "curses," if she failed (Deuteronomy 28:15-68). With excruciating detail, Lamentations describes the curses Israel signed her name to. But God had sworn in that same covenant that even when his people were living in the land of their enemies he would not reject them completely, and that he would remember his covenant and bring them home (Leviticus 26:44-45; Deuteronomy 30:1-5). Lady Jerusalem's demand that God look and consider is not a protest against the covenant. It is a claim on the covenant's own ending.
God answered that claim by entering her ruins. In Lamentations, God does the unthinkable to his own house, rejecting his altar and abandoning the sanctuary where his presence lived (Lamentations 2:6-7). Centuries later Jesus stood in the rebuilt temple, pointed to his own body, and said that if this temple were destroyed he would raise it in three days (John 2:19-21). What Babylon did to God's house, Rome did to God's son. Jesus was abandoned in the night by his friends (Matthew 26:56). He was stripped and publicly exposed while soldiers divided his clothing (John 19:23-24). Those who passed by shook their heads and scoffed at him, the same gesture Lamentations records passersby making at the ruined city (Matthew 27:39; Lamentations 2:15).
From inside that devastation Jesus prayed Jerusalem's prayer. His cry that God had forsaken him is the first line of a poem Israel already sang in her abandonment (Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1). Lady Jerusalem had asked God to look and received silence, and Jesus prayed into that same silence. But he prayed it to "my God," holding the covenant relationship at the moment he could not feel it. And the poem he prayed does not end where he stopped quoting it. It ends by confessing that God did not despise the afflicted one, did not hide his face from him, but listened to his cry (Psalm 22:24).
Three days later God did what Lady Jerusalem asked. He looked, he considered, and he acted. The house that was torn down was raised, and that raising was not a suspended sentence but the end of an exile. Israel's hard service was completed and her term was served (Isaiah 40:1-2). The widow with no husband was told that her Maker would be her husband, that God had turned away for a moment and would gather her back with everlasting compassion (Isaiah 54:5-8). The city that said again and again that she had no one to comfort her was given a Comforter who will never leave (Lamentations 1:2, 1:9, 1:16, 1:17, 1:21; John 14:16-18). God's last word to his people is not the verdict of "guilty." God's last word to his people is not judgment. God's last word, even to a people who have not held up their end of the covenant, is the restoring and resurrecting life of Jesus. The widow becomes a bride, and God himself wipes the tears from her cheeks (Revelation 21:2-4; Lamentations 1:2).
See for Yourself
May the Holy Spirit open your eyes to see the God who does exactly what he has said he will do. And may you see Jesus as the one who prayed Jerusalem's forsaken prayer from inside her ruins and was raised as the house God rebuilt.