GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LAMENTATIONS 3:55-56
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55 I called on your name, O LORD,
from the depths of the pit;
56 you heard my voice:
‘Do not close your ear to my relief, my cry for help.’
Here in the prayer from Babylon, the prophet and poet reminds God that he has been praying, calling on God’s name, even as he has squirmed and writhed in agony in the bottom of the pit. Here I think we see the pit of suffering, a spiritual death in which the prophet understood that apart from God we are nothing at all. This pit can even be from a torment that is only within the mind and heart and not from outside at all. In one of his early sermons, Luther said: “Even if the whole world outside leaves us in peace, behold, each one of us is himself a very great and spacious sea, full of reptiles and animals, large and small. Indeed, even the great dragon is in us. Just consider how many storms the eye alone stirs up, how many the ear, and the tongue! And besides, our slippery soul– how many deadly and reptilian thoughts it cherishes! How many beasts, large and small, are there– the various and constantly changing desires, cares and hatreds, fears, hopes, pains, and vain delights!” (LW 51:25). Luther’s honesty should be no surprise to anybody, except that few have heard anyone say it out loud. Even for the exiles, the more ordinary torments of fallen humanity still plagued them. Coveting, greed, hatred, impatience, arrogance, gossip, lust, short temper, and the habit of giving up of worship– such things are the temptations that “climb in through the windows” every day (Jeremiah 9:21).
The exile bearing the first cross in Babylon lifts up his voice to God, and begins with the simplest request: “Don’t close your ear.” There are two words of help here, both nouns: the first is simply help or relief; the second is a cry for help. This seems to be an idiom or expression we would not use, because we would just say “my cry for help.” But perhaps the ”relief,” the first term, is the intercession of another on behalf of the exile. However we understand it, the meaning is clear. The one praying has turned to God for help.
On the second cross, the one Jesus suffered upon, we remember once again the things Jesus spoke from the cross. Three were prayers to the Father: “Father forgive them,” and then “Why have you forsaken me?” and finally, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” The second one of these seems to fit the words here in Lamentations the best. His cry for help had to go unanswered, because he was suffering on behalf of mankind. Therefore the relief for humanity was being given, even though the cry for help from the one being punished went unanswered. The Father did not close his ear to the one, but had to close his ear to the other, for our sakes.
The third cross is the daily cross of the Christian. It is not a cross of punishment, but it is a burden of many tests and trials. The Lord places these things into our way in order to beat down the sinful self. When we think that the Christian life is an easy one, one with no effort, we set ourselves up for a fall. When we accept the tests God gives to us, we learn valuable lessons that will help us make it through harder tests in the future.
Take the classic Sunday school bulletin board imagery: “Train up a child in the way he should go” (Proverbs 22:6). Invariably this is accompanied by a nice picture of a choo-choo train with children in the cars going up a gentle (or steep) hill. Usually the second half of the verse (“and when he is old he will not depart from it”) is left off, to no fault of the teacher. I’ve seen this dozens of times in dozens of Sunday school rooms. What message does it convey to children? Since I myself saw it as a child, more than once, I can give at least one answer. It can make a child think that being a Christian is like riding on a train. That’s a fine application of justification, the doctrine that we are saved by Christ and not by our own effort, and that as long as we ride the “Jesus train,” we will get to heaven. It’s brilliant and it’s correct doctrine. But it is not the point of Proverbs 22:6. The Proverb is all about our subject here in Lamentations (and in many of the Proverbs) of the Christian’s cross of suffering. A child who is trained (the verb, not the noun) to act in a Christian way in all situations and to accept correction and instruction is a child who will learn to despise the sinful nature, to drown the Old Adam every day, and to hand his or her sins over to Christ on the cross.
How can we keep up this training? It may help to pray what somebody might call the world’s most dangerous prayer: “Dear Lord God, please send trouble and difficulty into my life to make me see the need for you more clearly. Make me cling to you more tightly by losing my grip on all of the things that pull me down, away from you. Let me lose whatever idols I’ve been clinging to so very sinfully. Strike my life, Lord, so that I will lose the life I thought I had found, and in losing it, let me find my true life in you and for your sake. I pray, Lord: receive me. Do not throw me away. Grab onto me and hold me so that I will learn to hold onto you more tightly, and never let me go. I ask this is Jesus’ name. Amen.”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Lamentations 3:55-56 my relief, my cry for help