Listening to the outpouring of someone else’s grief as we do in these verses can be painful and disturbing. The expressions of pain and the horror of the situation grow in intensity, with mothers reduced to eating their own dead children (v 20). Nothing remains of the past; everything is black and hopeless.
Read More confusion, grief, dépression, theological questionsThe mood changes. The speaker here is a man who in his own personal pain mirrors something of the pain of Jerusalem. The Hebrew word for man here implies a man of strength or valour; this makes his condition all the more moving. It is debated whether he is to be identified with the narrator of the earlier chapters.
Read More judgment, pain, hope, discipline, unfailing loveThe high notes of yesterday are not quite maintained. A recital of injustice, desperate pleas to God and a cry for vengeance are more prominent. Evil and pain are all-pervasive and cannot be ignored; they act as a constant challenge to faith, and anyone who pretends otherwise has not plumbed the depths of human agony or faced the questions that it raises.
Read More evil, pain, comfort, returnJudah’s end was drawn out. The first exiles went to Babylon in 605 bc; this chapter depicts the siege which culminated in the fall of the city and the capture of Zedekiah in 587 (v 20). The descriptions are by now familiar: the slow death by starvation (v 9), the inability of mothers to feed their young (v 4), the rich reduced to living skeletons (vv 7,8) ,…
Read More responsibility, atrocities, kingdomThis, the shortest poem in the book, has much in common with the lament psalms. It repeats many of the earlier themes. The dire situation is described: invasion, occupation, starvation, rape, servitude, the collapse of social order, the destruction of the worship centre.
Little wonder that joy has been replaced by mourning (v 15).
Read More prayer, restoration, lament, complaint, way back to God