Lamentations of Jeremiah 3

Question:

God instructed me to read the chapter, but I get confused on the actual message that God wants to say to me.

Comment:

I'm not going to copy out the entirety of what is a very long chapter. The Lamentations are poems of a sort, written after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. They were not written by Jeremiah—the style and references are very different—but they reflect the prophet's grief that his warnings had been ignored and Jerusalem is fallen. They were designed to be recited aloud; in Hebrew they form a series of acrostics, in which each stanza begins, in order, with one of the 22 letters of the alphabet. This dimension is, of course, lost in English translation.

The first half of the third chapter is a vivid description of what St. John of the Cross, hundreds of years later, would term "the Dark Night of the Soul." It is a time when nothing works, nothing relieves the sorrow and darkness—not even prayers and rituals that have worked in the past. It seems to the lamenter that God has turned completely against him: "He is to me like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in hiding; he led me off my way and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate" (3:10-11 RSV). And yet, out of that darkness comes a renewed affirmation that "the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases" (3:22 RSV). The lamenter realizes that what has happened to Jerusalem is a consequence of negative choices made by the people, and that what is required is endurance, patience, and the certainty that the Lord will respond to their grief: "Let us examine our ways, and return to the Lord!" (3:40 RSV) In other words, we are in the Dark Night so long as we feel ourselves to be victims, and blame God for our sadness. Once we realize that we are experiencing the consequences of our own fear-based choices, and decide to make new choices based in a total faith in the Divine, the darkness has served its purpose and we are moving toward the dawn of new possibilities.

Blessings!

Rev. Ed