Book Notice: Chris Wright on Lamentations

Christopher J.H. Wright

The Message of Lamentations (BST)
Downers Grove: IVP, 2015.
Available at Amazon.com

By Jill Firth

Christopher Wright sets the Book of Lamentations in our contemporary life context by dedicating the work to Syria’s suffering children and by including a frontispiece of an agonised woman during floods in Northern Pakistan in 2011. In his Preface, Wright notes his lack of personal experience of the kind of devastation which is experienced in Pakistan and Syria, and which forms the setting for the Book of Lamentations in the horrors of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 587 BC. ‘Who am I,’ he asks, to be writing about these ‘tear-soaked words.’

Wright also notes his own previous neglect of the Book of Lamentations, which is seldom studied and seldom preached in the West today. His goal is to pay respect to the suffering of Lady Zion in the Book of Lamentations, and to develop a resource that will help others to hear her cries and to become more tuned in to the heart of God and more able to respond to contemporary disaster with authentic biblical lament.

Wright invites us to cast our theology of the character of God ‘into the furnace of dire experience in this fallen world,’ as Lamentations invites us to wrestle with ‘the massive theological issues that permeate its poetry,’ especially the tension between God’s love and goodness and the experience of extreme suffering and the seemingly disproportionate ‘savage flood of implacable evil and brutality’ which accompanied God’s judgment of Israel in the sixth century BC.

The five chapters of Lamentations are ‘an intricate composition of a single mind’ according to Wright, who rejects the view that the book is a collection of laments written over a long period by different authors. While he affirms the book’s anonymity, he considers that the book could have been written by Jeremiah, expressing the anguish of the Exile alongside the words of hope found in Jeremiah 30-33. The loss of kingship mourned in Lamentations 4.20 is compatible with the negative portrayal of King Zedekiah in the Book of Jeremiah, as the wickedness of Zedekiah did not invalidate the value of the role he was supposed to play in protecting Israel.

While Wright considers there is only one voice in the Book, he sees it speaking through different characters in Chapters 1-2, especially the Poet’s dialogue partner, Lady Zion, a personification of the city of Jerusalem (literally ‘Daughter Zion’, a term of affection). The Poet also expresses a range of moods, including grief, pain, hope and prayer. One voice is famously silent in the Book of Lamentations, as God does not speak as a character in the text. ‘If God were to speak, what would God say?’ asks Kathleen O’Connor (quoted on page 43). O’Connor argues that the effect of the Missing Voice is to honour human voices of grief and despair.

Wright agrees with the power of O’Connor’s argument. Yet he adds that Lamentations is now found in the canon of Scripture, and so it becomes part of God’s own speech. This enables us to hear ‘the voice of the voiceless God’ who desires us to hear these anguished voices ‘within the ‘grand auditorium’ of scripture as a whole (page 44). Wright also notes that within the canon, other voices give the comfort which is lacking in the Book of Lamentations, especially drawing attention to many links with Isaiah 40-55 (page 45-46) and to Jesus’ own suffering.

O’Connor says that Lamentations is ‘a house for sorrow and a school for compassion’ (quoted on page 41). Studying Lamentations allows exploration and expression for the griefs of a congregation or an individual, but also the development of awareness and care for others who suffer, and an opportunity to learn to pray and to trust in the midst of devastation.

This compact volume in the BST series makes the reading of Lamentations accessible and achievable for the ordinary reader. Background details of history and Hebrew poetry are clearly and briefly explained to assist the reader to understand and appreciate the text. The book includes a select bibliography, Introduction, and chapters on each of the five chapters of Lamentations. Each chapter includes questions for reflection on the text and in our contemporary world. The work is not a commentary, but it achieves its aims of accuracy, relevance to contemporary life, and readability. It would be an excellent resource for a study group or sermon series.

Jill Firth lectures in Hebrew and Old Testament at Ridley College in Melbourne.