Scripture Daily

Context No. 395 of 4322 · Lamentations

Context · Reflection

Lamentations 3:49-66: in context

49My eye pours down and doesn’t cease, without any intermission, 50until the LORD looks down, and sees from heaven. 51My eye affects my soul, because of all the daughters of my city. 52They have chased me relentlessly like a bird, those who are my enemies without cause. 53They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and have cast a stone on me. 54Waters flowed over my head. I said, “I am cut off.” 55I called on your name, LORD, out of the lowest dungeon. 56You heard my voice: “Don’t hide your ear from my sighing, and my cry.” 57You came near in the day that I called on you. You said, “Don’t be afraid.” 58Lord, you have pleaded the causes of my soul. You have redeemed my life. 59LORD, you have seen my wrong. Judge my cause. 60You have seen all their vengeance and all their plans against me. 61You have heard their reproach, LORD, and all their plans against me, 62the lips of those that rose up against me, and their plots against me all day long. 63You see their sitting down and their rising up. I am their song. 64You will pay them back, LORD, according to the work of their hands. 65You will give them hardness of heart, your curse to them. 66You will pursue them in anger, and destroy them from under the heavens of the LORD.

This is a section of Lamentations spoken from the very bottom. The poet describes weeping without stopping, being hunted by enemies like a bird, thrown into a pit, with water closing over his head, until he says the flattest words of despair there are: I am cut off. There is no lower place to speak from than that. And it is from exactly there, from the lowest part of the pit, that he does the one thing left to do. I called on your name, O LORD, he says, out of the depths of the pit.

What follows is the heart of the passage, and it is tender in a way the surrounding grief does not prepare you for. You heard my voice, he says. Do not close your ear to my cry. You came near in the day that I called on you, and you said, Do not be afraid. Notice what God's response to the cry from the bottom actually was. Not, first, a change in the circumstances, the enemies were still there, the wrong still unavenged. His response was to come near, to close the distance to a man in a pit, and to speak two words over him: do not fear. Presence and reassurance came before any rescue of the situation. You have taken up my cause, the poet says, you have redeemed my life. And then, honestly, the same prayer turns raw, asking God to repay the enemies and pursue them, because Scripture lets a person hold both intimacy with God and unfiltered anger at those who wronged them in the same breath.

The line to carry is that God came near when he called from the pit. Two things are worth asking myself about that. When I am at the bottom, do I actually call, or do I go silent and sink? And do I expect, when I do call, what the poet received, not necessarily an instant fixing of everything, but God closing the distance and saying over me, do not fear?

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