This is part of a series of devotions based on the Daily Office, which is found in the Book of Common Prayer.
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 51; Lamentations 1:1-12; 2 Corinthians 1:1-7; Mark 11:12-25
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (Isaiah 12:2-6, BCP, p. 88); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (Revelation 15:3-4, BCP, p. 94)
Collect for Monday in Holy Week. Almighty God, whose dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (BCP, p. 220)
How lonely sits the city that once was full of people — Lamentations 1:1. This first chapter of the book of Lamentations is one of the most gruesome in all of Scripture. The “weeping prophet” Jeremiah (by tradition, the author of Lamentations) looks out over a city he loves, left desolate in the wake of the Babylonian destruction of 586 B.C.—like a bombed-out Dresden or Hiroshima or Aleppo. Jeremiah imagines Judah/Jerusalem as though she had been bride to a husband, Yahweh, who now is dead to her: “How like a widow she has become.” Worse, she had given herself to false lovers who had failed to care for and protect her. And now she has been violated by despoilers (“she has seen the nations invade her sanctuary”), only to be promptly tossed aside (“her uncleanness was in her skirts”—Lamentations 1:9,10). It’s among the ugliest scenes Scripture ever describes. I find it hard to take.
But the writer of Lamentations, whether the “weeping prophet” Jeremiah as tradition holds, or an anonymous poet worthy of the attribution, does what only a great artist can do: create haunting beauty from something grotesque. Picasso’s Guernica, a visual lament of the 1937 Nazi and Fascist bombing of that Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, is just such a piece. Guernica wrenches the cry, “How long, O Lord?”, from deep in my soul.
Just so, the book of Lamentations, one of the most beautifully crafted series of poems in all of Scripture (I’ll describe its overall architecture tomorrow), provides some of the most exquisite language for bringing to God our anguish and grief over human suffering.
Today’s Lamentations reading ends with a verse that has inspired one of the most powerful choral pieces I’ve had the privilege to sing, Z. Randall Stroope’s “O Vos Omnes,” a Latin rendering of Lamentations 1:12:
O vos omnes (O you people),
Qui transitis per viam (Who pass this way),
Attendite et videte (Look and see)
Si est dolor (If there is any sorrow),
Sicut dolor meus (Like my sorrow).
Recordare Domine (Remember, Lord),
Intuere et respice (Consider and notice)
Opprobrium nostrum (Our humiliation).
Here’s a YouTube link to a recording of Stroope conducting Canticum Novum, with visuals from Auguste Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” (commemorating the Hundred Years’ War)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjPeqih9fxc
The book of Lamentations presents one of the many ways that the Old Testament anticipates the desolation of abandonment that Jesus would endure for us on the cross. Holy Week is an extended invitation to embrace what today’s collect calls “the way of the cross.” Whatever form “the way of the cross” takes for you this day and this week—especially if you are wondering, like Jeremiah, “if there is any sorrow like my sorrow”—, I pray you embrace that “way” with both honesty and courage. I pray that you find it indeed “none other than the way of life and peace, through Jesus Christ.”
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+