Let’s Get Real
A Meditation on Jeremiah 20:7-13
WHEN LIFE BECOMES CRUEL
A few years ago, I received a call to visit a woman who was a member of the church where I was serving. She had specifically asked for me because I had conducted the funeral for her father a few months before. It had been a traumatic time for her and her two small children, because he had lived with them and had been an integral part of the family and a significant support to her and her husband in their care of their children. The sudden heart attack that had taken his life, despite his strength and good health, had surprised them all and left the whole family feeling lost. Yet now, while her grief was still intense and raw, I was there again to help her face the loss of her husband.
When I arrived at her home, I could see that she had been crying. But knowing that she would have to carry her children through their grief and questions, she was amazingly calm and strong. As we talked, she explained what had happened. Her husband was leaving work to head home. As he drove out of the basement of his company’s building and stopped to check for traffic, a cash-in-transit heist was in progress down the road. Someone fired a gun, and the bullet flew through his window and into his head, killing him instantly. It was a tragic fluke which, had he been two seconds faster or slower, would have been averted.
As this brave woman related her story, I was astonished by her ability to recognise the obvious questions—Why? Where was God? How could this be allowed to happen?—without obsessing over them or demanding answers. All she said was, “God is testing me, John, and I’m not sure how much more I can handle. But for now, I’m coping.”
I have long discarded faith in an interventionist God who had the power to prevent such unspeakable tragedies, but for some higher purpose, ‘allowed’ them to happen. And I am completely convinced that God was not testing her. But looking back now, as I face the unavoidable and excruciating reality of my wife’s almost certainly fatal glioblastoma, I am grateful to that grieving widow for reminding me of lament’s profound and comforting power to sustain us, especially when the world is cruel.
THE WEEPING PROPHET
Neither I, nor the mother who lost her husband so suddenly are the first to experience such raw collisions with grief. The ancient Israelites, both collectively and personally, lived through slavery, war, conquest, exile, rebuilding, and imperial occupation. But it was this harsh history that gave birth to the deep and robust faith that became their essential support and guide. At the time when the prophet Jeremiah lived, for example, the people were caught between their longing to return to the ‘golden age’ of David and their fear of the rising threat of Babylon.1 At the heart of this spirituality, which was forged in the tragedies, traumas, failures, and griefs of the real world, was the ruthlessly honest prayer practice known as lament.2
The Lectionary reading from the Hebrew Scriptures for Proper 7A from Jeremiah 20:7-13 is, perhaps, the ultimate example of this prayer form, but it is just one of many lamentations that have been recorded from the prophet Jeremiah.3 After receiving his call to be a prophet, Jeremiah began what became one of the longest prophetic ministries in the Bible.4 But his message was not comfortable. It was challenging, accusing, and confrontational. Unsurprisingly, the people, who did not want to accept Jeremiah’s warnings of coming disaster, responded with anger and abuse, and so Jeremiah’s life grew increasingly miserable, which is why he is often referred to as “the weeping prophet”.
Immediately before the prayer in 7:13–20, the prophet was beaten and put in the stocks by Pashhur, the priest in charge of the temple (20:1-6). This didn’t silence Jeremiah, however, and as soon as he was released, he spoke a message of warning and judgment over Pashhur. But then his anguish overflowed, and he turned to God in an angry prayer of lament.
Significantly, despite his persecution, the prophet did not abandon his ministry or turn his back on his faith or his God. He was enraged, but he took that rage to God. Yet God did not destroy or judge him. Rather, it was in the outrage that Jeremiah found the strength to continue. Sadly, he never found an end to his suffering and was constantly at odds with the people to whom he delivered God’s message. Grief, suffering, loss, and abuse were the pattern of his life, and yet he managed to endure them without losing his conviction or watering down his prophecies.
Jeremiah’s faithfulness grew from his ability to be honest and open with God. He refused to pretend that his faith delivered him from pain, or that he could authentically accept whatever came in beatific trust and passivity. He insisted on living a faith that was completely and absolutely truthful, even when the truth was not pretty.
THE ANATOMY OF LAMENT
The ancient prayer practice of lament is not popular in today’s church. We have come to believe that our prayers “must be polite and positive and filled only with gratitude”, and we have little space in our spirituality for anger, hatred, outrage, or life’s tragic absurdities.5 The faith of the Scriptures, however, is often raw, furious, and even accusatory toward God, even while clinging to the belief that God hears and responds; that prayer is a dialogue in which God can be counted on to respond.
The psalmists, the prophets, the priests, and even Jesus himself, knew what it was to rage at God, to shake their fists, to raise their voices in challenge, and to call God to account. For our faith ancestors, a deep and committed trust in the promises of God gave legitimacy to an honest, passionate, and faithful dialogue with God in the midst of life’s pain and grief. Those who put their trust in God knew that God had made promises to protect and provide. They also knew what it was to feel that God had failed in keeping God’s promise, and they were unafraid to bring their anger and disappointment to God in prayer.
This impassioned cry of a broken but faithful heart is the essence of lament, and it is a healing, strengthening, and faith-building spiritual discipline which is ignored or neglected only at great cost.6
The prayer of lament is made of four basic elements, each with a particular part to play in the whole:
