Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church

5^th of October, 2025

Content Warning: This Reflection talks about situations of exile, sexual assault, siege, starvation, and death.

Lamentations 1:1-6

The Kingdom of Judah has fallen. Its capital, Jerusalem, has been destroyed. Like its sister-nation, Israel, it is being punished for its sins. It will never again be an independent nation. While Israel was punished for trampling on the needy, and bringing to ruin the poor of the land, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and selling the sweepings of the wheat (Amos 8:1-12), for sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols (Hosea 11:1-11); Judah is being punished for not ceasing to do evil, learning to do good; seeking justice, rescuing the oppressed, defending the orphan, pleading for the widow. (Isaiah 1:1, 10-20) The prophets warned the people of Judah what was to come, and they failed to heed the warnings. They have brought this destruction on themselves. ‘How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal.’

That is certainly one story that we could tell. The people of God have failed to live in God’s way, and so God, the good parent, is chastising them to make them change their ways. But is that the story that the Book of Lamentations is telling?

The Book of Lamentations is a collection of five mourning poems written in response to the destruction of the city of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BC. They are poems written in response to a real, historical, tragedy, and they make no attempt to hide the horrors of what has occurred. As we hear in today’s reading, the book begins in tragedy, and when we have read all five poems, we find that the book also ends in tragedy. The final verses of the entire book are ‘Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old—unless you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure’. (Lamentations 5:21-2) Of the psalms it is said that the proper setting of praise is as lament resolved, but lament in the Book of Lamentations is never resolved, and there is no praise.

For the past few months, we have been listening to the prophets’ warning, ‘Thus says the Lord.’ Now that what they were warning of has come to pass, the Lord is silent. The prophet Amos warned that a time would come when the Lord God would send a famine of hearing the words of the Lord on the land: ‘They shall wander from sea to sea and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.’ (Amos 8:11-12) In the Book of Lamentations, that famine has come. In this book, we hear from a narrator and from ‘Daughter Zion,’ but there is no word from God.

The narrator and Daughter Zion both describe appalling destruction. What today’s reading tells us is bad enough, but the rest of the book is worse. There is starvation: ‘children and infants faint in the streets of the city. They say to their mothers, “Where is bread and wine?” as they faint like the wounded in the streets of the city, as their lives ebb away in their mothers’ arms.’ (Lamentations 2:11-12) ‘Because of thirst the infant’s tongue sticks to the roof of its mouth; the children beg for bread, but no one gives it to them.’ (Lamentations 4:4) Princes and priests have been killed in the Temple; the bodies of the young and old lie together in the streets; both young men and young women have been killed by the sword. (Lamentations 2:20-21) But ‘Those killed by the sword are better off than those who die of famine; racked with hunger, they waste away for lack of food from the field.’ (Lamentations 4:9) Twice we are told of the single most appalling result of Jerusalem’s fall: mothers have killed and cooked their own children. (Lamentations 2:20, 4:10)

Worst of all, all of this has happened at the hands of the Lord: ‘How the Lord has covered Daughter Zion with the cloud of his anger! … Without pity the Lord has swallowed up all the dwellings of Jacob; in his wrath he has torn down the strongholds of Daughter Judah … The Lord is like an enemy; he has swallowed up Israel … He has multiplied mourning and lamentation for Daughter Judah.’ (Lamentations 2:1-5)

Although she is described as ‘Daughter,’ in the personified figures of ‘Daughter Zion’ and ‘Daughter Judah’ we are seeing an example of the marriage metaphor, the prophetic metaphor about the relationship between the Lord, metaphorized into a loving, wronged, and enraged husband, and the people of God, metaphorized into a loved but unfaithful wife. As I have said before, the lectionary readings avoid this imagery, and I agree with the lectionary, but in our Scriptures, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel all describe the nation and the city of Zion as a lustful woman who is punished by being metaphorically sexually assaulted: prophetic pornography.[1] Lamentations also includes this element of the marriage metaphor; immediately after today’s lectionary reading ends, we read, ‘Jerusalem has sinned greatly and so has become unclean. All who honoured her despise her, for they have all seen her naked.’ (Lamentations 1:8)

It might be our cultural context that tells us that no matter what the metaphorical Daughter Zion might have done, she does not deserve to be metaphorically sexually abused. We, as twenty-first-century readers, know that this scripturally attested punishment does not fit the crime. But the Book of Lamentations itself challenges the story with which I started today’s Reflection. There are statements in Lamentations, including in today’s reading, that Jerusalem has fallen because ‘the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions’. But these transgressions are never named. Amos and Hosea and First Isaiah and Jeremiah all make it completely clear what the sins of Israel and Judah are. Daughter Zion merely says, ‘My sins have been bound into a yoke; by his hands they were woven together. They have been hung on my neck, and the Lord has sapped my strength.’ (Lamentations 1:14) What these particular sins were, we never hear.

Instead, we are told in excruciating detail of the suffering Daughter Zion is experiencing. As Daughter Zion complains, ‘The punishment of my people is greater than that of Sodom’. (Lamentations 4:6) Nothing that Judah had done could justify the starvation, exile, and death her people are experiencing. Another way of saying it might be, no possible war crime can ever justify genocide.

In synagogues today, the Book of Lamentations is read on Tisha B’Av in memory not only of the sixth-century BC fall of Jerusalem, but of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and of the Shoah, the twentieth-century Holocaust. Numerous Jewish people and groups are also using the poetry of Lamentations to mourn what is happening today in Gaza. Jewish Voice for Peace has a Tisha B’Av liturgy that laments:

The creation of the Golden Calf, the manifestation of the Israelites’ fear and doubt. Today we lament the fear and doubt that, when provoked by politicians, can whip citizens into a frenzied call for blood. For the readiness of the Jewish people to demonize the Other, and become immune to the humanity of Gazans.

The expulsion of the Jewish people from Spain, France, England, the loss of home, community, and safety, also said to have happened on the 9th of Av. Today we bear witness to the loss of home, community, and safety for Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the IDF.

The false witness given by the spies sent out to scout the land of Israel, before the Israelites entered in the book of Numbers. Theirs was a testimony that stirred up doubt, fighting amongst ourselves, and the subsequent destruction of a generation. Today we are held accountable for the decimation of generations of lives in Gaza at this very moment.

The cry of the poet of Lamentations can be used to give words to the grieving of all times and all places.

This has been a very heavy Reflection; I want to end with comfort. The Book of Lamentations says, ‘Zion stretches out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her’. (Lamentations 1:17) Throughout Lamentations, the Lord never sees, responds to, or comforts Daughter Zion. But in the opening words of Second Isaiah, we find: ‘Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for her sins.’ (Isaiah 40:1-2). The Lord is apologising to Daughter Zion; Second Isaiah is confirming the assessment of her suffering that she made in Lamentations; it was excessive, she had received a double punishment. Third Isaiah calls on her to arise, put on beautiful garments, shake herself from the dust and loose the bonds from her neck. (Isaiah 52:1-2) In the prophecies of Second and Third Isaiah, we read the sequel to the story that Lamentations tells, and that sequel is comfort and renewal.

Please God, may comfort and renewal be the sequel to all situations of siege, starvation, exile, and death. Amen.

[1] J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012, pp. 105-131.