A Lenten Lament 2/28 Phil.3:17-4:2, Lk. 13:31-35

We may well sing O Sacred Head Now Wounded this Lenten season. The third verse asks, "what language shall  borrow?" I admire bob Costas's facility with words on the Olympics. I wonder about the overuse of words such as awesome of late. It is no easy task to find the words or form to express ourselves. In a widely admired essay, Walter Brueggemann spoke of the costly loss of lament. He argued that an insistence of being positive in all circumstances did not fit the realities of life. We were cheating ourselves of expression and mental health if we did not avail ourselves of the biblical tradition of prayer as complaint, as lamenting the absence of good.O Jerusalem, Jerusalem reminds me of O Absalom. Absalom. my son, my son. The same parental impulse is here, that aching pain of a parent who wants to absorb the pain of a child, who wants to steer them away from harmful decisions, but they know that a child has to make their own mistakes. 

 

We get a startling reminder that Jesus is someone under a destiny when he says that he must, must be on his way toward Jerusalem.-redemptive purpose of  God revealed in the life of Jesus.With the image of the mother hen, we have  a wonderful image of alerting us to danger, of soft security under the wings, but also the potent face of danger if it attacks. The fate of Jesus and Jerusalem asserts an intertwined danger. Foxes and birds appear in the vocabulary of Jesus as metaphors for the circumstances of everyday life. "We live in a menagerie" (NIB-283). We are confronted by evils from without.

 

The lament of Jesus  emerges from disappointment and compassion. Jesus had great hopes for the reception of his message. Still, he could see the road to Jerusalem as one of rejection and his demise. Apparently he could foresee that Jerusalem would fall to the Romans, even though fear of Rome would be used as an excuse to deliver him over to them to the cross.

 

Lament as complaint rarely gets the last word in Scripture. it usually ends with an image of hope. Paul sees enemies of the cross who are unable to face self-denial. That hits us between the eyes with our thoughts of comfort food or retail therapy. Paul's call of the commonwealth of heaven is a wellspring of hope. We are caught between two worlds, where we live in this world but so yearningly hope that it would be more heavenly. We face inner evils just as dangerous as outer ones. We know that our heavenly reward is great but most of us are in no hurry to be there. Still, if we possess what Paul calls the mind of Christ, we know where our allegiance lies. We know that we will share the life of Christ and be transformed into the very presence of the divine. In the face of temptation, Paul offers a simple admonition: to stand firm. I watch in awe how the Olympic athletes stand firm on their ski jump into space or on twisted ankles on the speedskating track. Lamenting prayer is not a failure to stand firm. it is firm perseverance in the faith, in the trust we have in a God with open ears. It is the faith we can have in a God of compassion. It is also the prayer of faith that knows that things are not the way they are supposed to be. it is a faithful prayer that God can work toward the good. God can even transform, in time, the evils that befall us all and weave them into good.