Lament and grief emerge in the experience of people and communities who have gone through the most painful, violent experiences that life can throw at us.
The starting place for hope-filled grief in the Bible is Exodus 2:23-25 “The people of Israel groaned under their bondage and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning…” Grieving is the most visceral response to things not being right, such as our grieving for Ukraine or for the children of Gaza. It is often the beginning of prophetic imagination and revolution, of the hope that things could and need to be different. The word za’ak, to cry out, in Hebrew has a double meaning: it is a cry of misery and it also means the filing of an official complaint. There is an expectation that the wrong which has been cried out will be responded to and answered. This grieving, the revealing that all is not right, is the first moment in prophetic and ethical consciousness; it is the beginning of turning to hope. And God acknowledges this cry at the beginning of our religious history:” I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters…” Exodus 3:7-8
The re-direction of grief, addressing cries to where they can be answered, rather than where they are ignored, is often the beginning of hope and empowerment. Then a previously powerless people begin to make their own history. Exodus 11:6 and 12:30 play on the two cries of the people and of the Egyptians as Pharaoh’s power is being dismantled around him. A new history had begun which is still being worked out today but which is captured universally in many of the Psalms. These Psalms are informed by trauma:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Psalm 22 (cf. Jesus on the Cross in Mark 15: 34)
They emerge in the experience of people and communities who have gone through the most painful, violent experiences that life can throw at us:
Do not cast me away when I am old,
do not forsake me when my strength is gone.
Psalm 71
I cry aloud to God, that he may hear me…
Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?”
Psalm 77
O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?
Psalm 88
The writers of the psalms have much to ponder such as the desolation expressed in the song of the exile in Psalm 137, and the strange letter of the prophet Jeremiah (29:4-28) where he buys a plot of land in the territory to be occupied at Anathoth (32:6f). Jeremiah rejects the option of despair or revolutionary illusion but keeps his hope alive in captivity through the buying of the land, and the vision of continuing daily life and work and the giving in marriage. The hope implicit in this keeps insanity at bay and undermines the oppression of how things are. He cites an expression of this from Habakkuk 3:17:
“Though the fig does not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail,
and fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord.”
In the Wisdom literature of the Bible, the psalms, lamentations and proverbs develop a new understanding of hope by clearly exploring its opposite in the form of despair. Individual, community and national despair are expressed in extensive detail. Just as the ancient Biblical people could not avoid despair, nor can the reader and modern believer. A lament is not a question – it is a cry that wants to be heard. God always hears it even if no one else does. So what the Bible does through its psalms, laments and practical wisdom is permit our failure and brokenness to be expressed before it shows us how to respond next:
Arise, cry out in the night,
at the beginning of the night watches!
Pour out your heart out like water
before the presence of the Lord!
Lift your hands to him
who faint for hunger at the head of every street.
Lamentations 2:19
How long O Lord? I cry for help, but you do not listen.
Habakkuk 1:2; 2: 2-4.
He has walled me in; I cannot escape;
he has made my chains heavy;
and when I call and shout,
he shuts out my prayer.
Lamentations 3: 7-8
These texts are just a few examples that express the language of suffering before we can seek the language of hope.
Hope in Song and Poetry
Prophetic imagination and the hope it provokes, always needs song, poetry and art to find appropriate expression. So we also have the liberated and liberating song of the Sea in Exodus 15:1-18 and the Song of Miriam in Exodus 15:21 which focus on the freedom of God to act to deliver his people. We have the victory song of Deborah in Judges 5 and Hannah’s Prayer song in 1 Samuel 2. The use of the name of God as freedom and hope occurs again and again in the Old Testament songs and in the psalms as they explore its meaning and implications. This is anticipated before the coming of Jesus in the songs of Mary and Elizabeth. So at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, we are challenged by the Prophetic hope-filled imagination of two women.
Those who pray the office of Evening Prayer, celebrate this every day when Mary meets Elizabeth and the spirit of Moses’ sister Miriam flames forth again. The child (John the Baptist) dances in Elizabeth’s womb, like David before the Ark of the Covenant coming to Jerusalem, and the two women sing songs about their people’s longing for the Saviour. Here the male voice of Elizabeth’s priest husband Zechariah, is silent. Until he bends to the Archangel Gabriel’s message, to the free will of God, and names his son John, the only voices heard in this household are two women. With extraordinary faith and intensity they express the prophetic imagination and hope of their people, and anticipate its renewal as God comes close again in sovereign freedom.
But note this coming close starts not in the Temple, the Royal court, the holy places or among the priesthood but from the poor, powerless and oppressed. God’s Spirit in Mary and Elizabeth is working towards a new undefined but hoped for community. So at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, they sum up in song the prophetic, promised hope of their people which Jesus will enact in his life and ministry, in particular in his stories and above all in his meals. The poetic language of praise, prayer and worship is always dangerous, it breaks out of our control. It is a form of language which makes possible compassion and justice, transforming fear into energy and active hope. It can speak to, and be sung by, everyone. It is this language that can heal the brokenness and offer resilience.
