Hall Lament Forgive

A New Way to Approach Forgiveness
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-912403-02-8
Verlag: Cookies and Oxygen Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Time is a terrible healer. Our memories of the disloyalty, betrayal, or abuse we've suffered, keep the pain fresh and the consequences ongoing. No wonder we find forgiving so hard.

Traditionally, Christians view forgiveness as a gift we offer to the people who wrong us, but this fails to communicate anything about how we can receive healing from our mistreatment.

If you and I are going to believe God wants to liberate us from our past and heal our memories, a reframing of what it means to forgive is desperately required.

And to do that, we're going to need to start in an unexpected place: with the lament.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hall, Steve

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

Refusing Denial

Nestled after Jeremiah and before Ezekiel is a tiny book of poetry that is easily lost between the huge books either side of it. Just five poems long, the book of Lamentations captures the senseless tragedy and horror of seeing a city destroyed by war.

The city is Jerusalem, and the year is 586 BC. After a year-and-a-half long siege, the army of the Babylonian Empire broke through Jerusalem's gates in a mighty flood of sword and fire. This once glorious city now lies in ruins. Her walls have been torn down, the temple destroyed, and every building set alight. Smoke rises from the ashes like a funeral pyre, burnt bodies litter the streets, and packs of jackals prowl the squares. The majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants have been killed or dragged off by the invaders to become slaves. A severe famine leaves survivors wasting away from hunger and wishing they had died by Babylonian sword.

Lamentations is a bleak account. As you bravely—or dutifully—trudge through these five poems, your spirit longs for a glimpse of hope, a word of prophecy, or a small word of comfort from God. But it never comes. God remains silent. Instead, a handful of overlapping voices draw you in to the shocking aftermath of their individual or corporate experiences of Jerusalem's destruction. Verse after verse overflows with their raw pain, uncontrolled sorrow, and sheer unadulterated desperation.

By the end of Lamentations, part of you is glad it is such a short book while the other part of you is left disturbed by God’s continued distance. The book ends with the following lines:

Why do you always forget us?

Why do you forsake us so long?

Restore to us yourself, LORD, that we may return;

renew our days as of old

unless you have utterly rejected us

and are angry with us beyond measure.

—Lamentations 5:20-22

Imagine a Broadway show where you know who the lead actor is, but his character is neither seen nor heard for the entire duration of the play. The set has been designed to look like the front fascia of this character’s house. As the story progresses, you are given the impression he is home by the way lights inside the house turn on and off at random intervals. The rest of the cast congregate outside in the street. They are dressed in dirty and bloodied rags, with many appearing injured. All of them are starving. Some violent disaster has befallen them before the play began and together they mourn the loss of family, friends, and homes.

The cast obviously feel an attachment to the main character and believe this to be a reciprocal bond, for they spend the next three hours banging on his front door and windows. They speak about him, rage at him, repent to him, praise him, and cry out for his comfort, yet he never opens his door or even looks out a window. He chooses not to join their conversation, answer their accusations, or offer any form of comfort. They are met only with silence and absence.

The play ends with the cast questioning whether they have been abandoned by this lead character and assuming he must be immeasurably angry with them. The curtain falls, but as we walk out of the theatre, we swear we can still hear weeping coming from behind the curtain.

In such a disconcerting story, it's easy to see why we make the following chorus of praise—with its expressions of hope—the traditional focal point of Lamentations:

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion;

therefore I will wait for him."

—Lamentations 3:21-24

However, when we put praise at the heart of Lamentations, we can end up telling each other to respond to trauma with proclamations of hope, rejoicing, or thanksgiving. These are not always healthy responses to encourage. Not only do they suggest that God is uninterested in how we are feeling, they can also belittle our hurt or cause us to disown it. This traditional reading of Lamentations reinforces a stereotype of God many people on the margins already hold. It also supports our western culture's tendency to deny pain expression.

Our discomfort with agony may well have biased this reading of Lamentations.

All but eight verses in this third and central poem—what we label chapter 3—are written from the perspective of a male character. For the twenty verses leading up to his sudden outburst of praise, this man has been detailing the all-encompassing nature of his pain. He shares how his heart is a target for arrows and his body feels mauled by a lion. He describes being weighed down by chains, trampled in the dust, and stuffed with bitter herbs. His suffering engulfs him. Everywhere he looks he sees darkness as if he’s dwelling with the dead rather than with the living. He complains how his prayers for help are being blocked from reaching God’s ears.

When we read through the man’s poetic protests, they may not feel exaggerated but strike a chord within us. We recognise his agony if we too have known similar experiences where we have had our hearts broken and our spirits pierced. We know well the despair that overcomes us during the dark nights of the soul when we feel alone and our prayers for relief or change stay unanswered.

The man’s praise comes out-of-the-blue, but not because he has suddenly remembered God in the midst of his suffering. He has been talking about God all along, making it clear how he sees God as the one responsible:

I am one who has seen affliction

by the rod of the Lord’s wrath.

He has driven…

He has turned…

He has made…

He has broken…

He has besieged…

He has walled…

He has weighed…

He shuts out…

He has barred…

He dragged…

He mangled…

He pierced…

He has filled…

He has trampled…

—Excerpts from Lamentations 3:1-16

After blaming God for sixteen verses, the man spirals further into despair. Gone are the expectations he held for his future. No longer can he imagine life without suffering. The fabric of his world has torn apart, leaving only the bitter memories of his traumatic experience looping in his mind. He shares how his soul struggles under the weight of this constant remembering.

I have been deprived of peace;

I have forgotten what prosperity is.

So I say, "My splendor is gone

and all that I had hoped from the LORD.

I remember my affliction and my wandering,

the bitterness and the gall.

I well remember them,

and my soul is downcast within me.

—Lamentations 3:17-20

It is at this moment of despondency that the man unexpectedly shifts to hope and recalls to mind the beautiful chorus of praise I quoted earlier. If the poem ended here, its emphasis would be different, but we're only a third through.

The next three verses all start with the word good in the poem's original Hebrew. Good is God... Good is it to wait... Good is it to bear God's punishment... This repetition makes his statements less than convincing. It's as if he is trying to persuade himself these things are true.

The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,

to the one who seeks him;

it is good to wait quietly

for the salvation of the LORD.

It is good for people to bear the yoke

while they are young.

Let them sit alone is silence,

for the LORD has laid it on them.

—Lamentations 3:25-28 (emphasis mine)

The hope he expressed moments before is undone and he slips back into blaming God. He is unconvinced by his own statements. And so he should be. It's never good to experience the yoke of your city's destruction nor the death or enslavement of your people, regardless of how young or old you are. We know he disagrees with where his praise has led him because he doesn't stay quiet nor sit alone in silence accepting his suffering. Instead, he continues protesting the injustice he is undergoing:

Who can speak and have it happen

if the Lord has not decreed it?

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High

that both calamities and good things come?

Why should the living complain

when punished for their sins?

—Lamentations 3:37-39

The Babylonians have caused his suffering, however, the man’s understanding of the world doesn’t allow him to interpret Jerusalem’s destruction in this way. He believes bad things only happen if you’ve sinned against the divine. If you get a bumper crop at harvest time, the gods have blessed you, but if your crop gets ruined by drought they are displeased with you. If your nation wins a war, the gods fought with you, but if your nation loses then the gods are angry. The three rhetorical questions above give us a front row seat to this worldview.

Rarely are we as honest with ourselves as this man is about the depth of his hurt, yet even he hasn’t been honest enough, for no tears have fallen. He has narrated his suffering but has done so with carefully managed emotions to keep the pain itself at bay. Neither praise nor blame nor theological debate has led him to an outpouring of his anguish.

What leads him to express his grief is his community’s unexpected response to his three rhetorical questions. The survivors taking refuge in Jerusalem's broken shell, share how God has slain them without pity and blocked their prayers from reaching his ears.

Let us examine our ways...