Lamentations 2: Learning Lament

Lamentations 2:1-13

“the three goals of the initial poem—articulating grief, helping the community take responsibility for their shortcomings by means of spiritual interpretation, and helping members turn in prayer back to God as the only one who could take them beyond their catastrophe—are repeated in the second poem but at a more emotive and strident level in order to drive these messages home and encourage the community to turn to God in their own prayer.” 
- Leslie Allen

"In the dust of the streets 
lie the young and the old; 
  my young women and my young men 
have fallen by the sword; 
  you have killed them in the day of your anger, 
slaughtering without pity."
- Lamentations 1:21

“The Lord has done what he purposed; he has carried out his word; which he commanded long ago; he has thrown down without pity;
he has made the enemy rejoice over you and exalted the might of your foes.”
- Lamentations 1:17

“But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out.  The Lord will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me.” 
- Deuteronomy 28:15-20

“What would happen to our faith if we believed that God reigns sovereign over both our celebration and our suffering?”
- Soong Chan Rah

“This whole question of divine anger (ira dei) has been the subject of some sharp debate in the history of the church. It became known as the question of divine possibility (the quality or aptness in God to feel, suffer, or be angry) or impassibility (the denial of those qualities). Under the strong advocacy of Gnosticism (a philosophy that combined Greek and Oriental ideas with Christian teaching and professed access to truth that was a mystery to outsiders) a doctrine of God emerged that took the strongest exception to any claim that God could feel or suffer anything or that He could be angry.”
- Walter Kaiser

“believed that the God of the Old Testament was a ‘Demiurge’ (a god subordinate to the supreme God and responsible for the creation of evil) whose involvement in war, suffering, and judgments disqualified Him from being the God of grace and goodness whom Marcion found in most of Paul’s epistles in the New Testament.”
- Walter Kaiser

“Lactantius, wrote his De Ira Dei, ‘The Anger of God.’ For him passions or emotions were not in themselves evil, but avenues of virtue and goodness when kept under control. Furthermore, God must be moved to anger when He sees sin and wickedness in men and women just as He is moved to love them when they please Him. 
- Walter Kaiser

“He who loves the good, by this very fact hates the evil; and he who does not hate the evil, does not love the good; because the love of goodness issues directly out of the hatred of evil, and the hatred of evil issues directly out of the love of goodness. No one can love life without abhorring death; and no one can have an appetency for light, without an antipathy to darkness.”
- Lactantius

“our problem with anger is that we define it as Aristotle did, ‘the desire for retaliation’ or a desire to get even and get revenge for a slight or real harm done to us. With anger goes the idea of a ‘brief madness’ and ‘an uneasiness or discomposure of the mind, upon the receipt of an injury, with a present purpose of revenge.’ But Lactantius defined anger as ‘a motion of the soul rousing itself to curb sin.’
- Walter Kaiser