Three Contemporary Laments

Posted on January 13, 2025 by J Richard Middleton

I’ve been reflecting on the value of lament prayer ever since I went through a particularly dark time in my life many years ago. After not praying for some months, I found the lament psalms in the Bible as the door to hope, which opened me up to praying again.

These psalms are also known as protest or complaint psalms, and for good reason.

Lament as the Door to Hope

Lament psalms (like my own lament prayers) are not decorous and “proper”; they do not conform to the way that many Christians think we ought to pray. They are utterly honest, and thus often abrasive, attempts to grapple with God over situations that do not seem right.

Although there are approximately fifty psalms in the Bible that are typically regarded as laments (that is, about a third of the Psalter), the psalm that meant the most to me at the time was Psalm 88, arguably the darkest and most despairing of them all. I was particularly struck by the translation of Mitchell Dahood in his Psalms commentary in the Anchor Bible series.

To know that such honest prayers were canonized in the Bible (as models for our prayer) and to be able to articulate my own pain (no holds barred) to the Creator of the universe—that is what reawakened my faith. I gained a sense through lament prayer that God was willing to take my suffering seriously. That was the kind of God I could trust.

So it led to a deeper commitment to God on my part—in response to God’s own commitment to take suffering seriously. Indeed, God took it so seriously that it led to the cross.

Lament in Popular Music

Over the years, as I have come to value lament prayer, I noticed that there were some profound lyrics by various contemporary artists that articulated lament or protest to God, which people of faith could learn from.

Three pieces that have particularly impacted me are “Bartender” by the Dave Matthews Band (2002), “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by the Smashing Pumpkins (1995), and “Dear God” by XTC (1986). All three songs are formulated as prayers, addressing God with complaints or questions, and calling on God for help.

“Bartender” moves generally from petition to complaint. Intertwined with verses that address first “brother of mine” then “sister of mine” and then “mother of mine,” we find two verses where the singer pleads directly to God (the Bartender) to fill his glass “With the wine you gave Jesus that set him free / After three days in the ground.” Also interspersed between various verses is the cry: “I’m on bended knees / Oh, Bartender, please!” And once, “Oh, Father, please!”

In the second half of the song, complaint dominates, with the admission that the singer is overcome by another drink, which seems stronger than the one he’s been asking for. In counterpoint to the plea for resurrection life in the first half of the song, we find (also stated in two verses) this deathly admission: “The wine that’s drinking me / Came from the vine that strung Judas from the Devil’s tree / Its roots deep, deep in the ground.” Yet perhaps complaint doesn’t quite have the final word, since the song ends with the passionate cry: “I’m on bended knees / Oh, Bartender, please!”

You can find the lyrics here to a haunting acoustic solo version of “Bartender” sung by Dave Matthews (without the band). This is the original version (with the band).

The complaint in “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is that “the world is a vampire, sent to drain” and speaks of “betrayed desires,” while the chorus articulates the singer’s experience that “despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.” In the midst of repeating this line over an over, there is an external voice saying, “What is lost can never be saved.” Yet the singer yearns to be significant to God, almost screaming the line: “Jesus was an only son for you!” The song ends seemingly without hope, with the refrain, “I still believe that I cannot be saved”; the external voice has been internalized.

Warning: This song is in the “metal” genre. The music is especially abrasive (which makes it even more powerful). I’ve had some older church people ask me to turn it down (or even off!). However, I used to play this song in the car on my way to band practice at church. My kids, who would often accompany me, came to call it “the church song”!

“Dear God” also contains petitions, asking God to “make it better down here” and pleading: “we need a big reduction in amount of tears.” Specific problems are cited in the first two verses, including poverty and war, which afflict “all the people that you made in your image.” And in each case God is indicted as the cause of the problem. Starvation is because “they don’t get enough to eat / From God” and war is because “they can’t make opinions meet / About God.” And each verse ends by saying “I can’t believe in you.”

Then the third verse turns to the “crazy” things written in the Bible (“Your name is on a lot of quotes in this book”) and those people made in God’s image “Still believing that junk is true / Well I know it ain’t and so do you / Dear God.” The musical variations, from gentle to insistent, with violins at one point, make the lyrics especially poignant.

Then comes the bridge, where the music first pulls back, then increases in dynamic intensity to a climax. This section juxtaposes various elements of Christian theology (which the singer refuses to believe) with a list of wrongs in the world, followed by this declaration: “The hurt I see helps to compound/ That Father, Son and Holy Ghost / Is just somebody’s unholy hoax.”

But the song ends with a highly paradoxical statement: “And if you’re up there you’d perceive / That my heart’s here upon my sleeve / If there’s one thing I don’t believe in / It’s you / Dear God.” The question is why someone who doesn’t believe in God would tell this to God. Indeed, why they would write an entire song addressed to a God they don’t believe in? Because (and that’s the point of “my heart’s here upon my sleeve”) they desperately want to believe.

It was my engagement with lament prayer that led to my book, Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Here I addressed examples of vigorous prayer in the Bible, including the lament psalms, prophetic intercession in the tradition of Moses, and the book of Job. These examples prodded me to ask why Abraham didn’t lament or protest when God asked him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The book ends with a theology of lament prayer applicable to Christians in a world of pain and suffering. You can take a look at the Table of Contents and read the Introduction to Abraham’s Silence here.

In a follow-up post, I will note some of the other things I’ve written on lament.

A version of this blog is posted on the Northeastern Seminary website.

What Did Jesus Mean by the Kingdom of God? (The Kingdom of God, part 2)

Posted on January 1, 2025 by J Richard Middleton

In my last post, I addressed the reversal of power dynamics in the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. But beyond that, what did Jesus mean by this term?

The Nazareth Manifesto

Here we are helped by Luke’s Gospel, which does not use the term “kingdom of God” in Jesus’s opening message. Along with Matthew and Mark (the other Synoptic Gospels), Luke tells us about Jesus’s baptism by John (Matthew 3:13–17; Mark 1:9–11; Luke 3:21–22), followed by his temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4: 1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13). Then all three Gospel writers note that Jesus returns to Galilee and begins his preaching (Matthew 4:12–16; Mark 1:14; Luke 4: 14–15).

But whereas in Matthew and Mark, Jesus announces the coming of the kingdom in a short, succinct statement (Matthew 4:17; Mark 1:15), Luke has an extended account of a synagogue message that Jesus delivered in Nazareth, his hometown (Luke 4:16–30), without, however, any explicit mention of the kingdom.

Yet we know that Jesus was expounding on the nature of the kingdom in Luke’s account, since a bit later Luke notes that after Nazareth, Jesus moved on to Capernaum, another town in Galilee. And when he was about to leave Galilee to continue his mission in the province of Judea, Jesus explained: “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose” (Luke 4:43). In other words, Luke’s account of Jesus’s sermon in Nazareth is an example of his preaching about the kingdom of God.

It is likely that Luke gives us this more extended example of Jesus’s preaching instead of the succinct summary about the “kingdom” found in Matthew and Mark because he wanted to clarify the nature of the kingdom of God (a distinctively Jewish concept) to non-Jewish readers. Luke addressed his Gospel to “most excellent Theophilus,” who may have been a high-ranking gentile (Luke 1:1–4).

The way Jesus unpacks the nature of the kingdom in Luke 4, then, is particularly helpful for us—living in the twenty-first century—in cultures very different from first-century Galilee.

After his testing in the wilderness, Jesus began teaching in the synagogues of Galilee (Luke 4:14–15). When he arrived in his hometown, Nazareth, he attended the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom (Luke 4:16). He stood up to read the Scripture and was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the scroll to Isaiah 61 and read these words:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
       because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
       and recovery of sight to the blind,
       to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18–19)

Quoting Isaiah

The Scripture Luke quotes Jesus reading is Isaiah 61:1 and part of verse 2, with a line inserted from Isaiah 58:6 (“to let the oppressed go free”). In their original context, both Isaiah 61 and 58 were addressed to those Jews who had returned to their ancestral land, after having experienced exile in Babylon. Following a devastating series of attacks by the Babylonian empire in the late sixth century, which killed many Jews and destroyed the city of Jerusalem—along with the temple, the center of Jewish religious life—the Babylonians took a portion of the remaining population into exile, relocating them in the center of the empire.

Now, after a hiatus of nearly seventy years, as a result of a regime change (Babylon was conquered by the Persians), some Jews had returned to their homeland. Yet their society was still in shambles, characterized by internal injustice and oppression. Speaking in a post-exilic context, to those who had returned to the land, the prophet announced the “good news” of a new era (“the year of the Lord’s favor”) when God will act decisively on behalf of the poor, releasing captives, restoring sight to those who are blind, and setting the oppressed free.

Why does Jesus draw on this passage? And what did he mean by these phrases: “good news to the poor,” “release to the captives,” “recovery of sight to the blind” and “to let the oppressed go free”? In what way do these actions signify “the year of the Lord’s favor”? And how do they clarify the nature of the kingdom of God, which is being fulfilled in Jesus’ ministry?

The Problem of Spiritualizing Jesus’s Message

It has been very common for Christians through the ages to spiritualize Jesus’s Nazareth sermon, reducing the message to one of freeing people from internal captivity (bondage to sin) and spiritual blindness. Even the term “poor” in “good news to the poor” has been understood to mean those who were “poor in spirit” (aware of their “spiritual” needs).

Now, Jesus certainly did bring internal restoration (the forgiveness of sins) and a fundamental reorientation of values; this is clear from his call to repentance—radical change is required to be aligned with God’s kingdom. But to reduce Jesus’s message at Nazareth (or the meaning of God’s kingdom) solely to something internal is to misread his words in terms of an unbiblical value distinction of sacred/secular, spiritual/physical, or personal/social.

This framework, derived from later Christian tradition, which downplays outward action and the importance of social realities in relation to the importance of the inner person (the “soul”), is often imposed on the text from the outside. But no-one in Jesus’s day would have understood his words in this sense.

This spiritualizing interpretation is blown out of the water by the phrase “to let the oppressed go free,” which is taken from a prophetic passage in Isaiah 58:1–14. Here the prophet pointedly challenges landowners and others with power who exploit their workers (which included withholding their wages); yet these powerful people attend religious ceremonies and perform religious rituals (like fasting), while continuing to act unjustly towards others (their religious rituals even end, the prophet says, in quarreling and fighting).

Biblical Spirituality and Justice

This passage is one of many in the Old Testament that critique those who attempt to practice a form of religion (or spirituality) that is contradicted by their actual way of life. By contrast, Isaiah 58 describes the form of spirituality that pleases God.

Is not this the kind of “fasting” I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
(Isaiah 58:6–7)

These are concrete actions to remedy social injustice, which involve meeting the real needs of actual people. Isaiah 58 goes on to promise that if the people fulfill God’s requirements for justice with their neighbors, then the social order will be healed:

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in. (Isaiah 58:12)

A similar statement is found in Isaiah 61, just two verses after the section Jesus quotes:

They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations;
They shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations. (Isaiah 61:4)

It makes sense that Jesus (or Luke) connected Isaiah 61 and 58; both have to do with social renewal in postexilic Judah. So the insertion of Isaiah 58:6 at the end of Isaiah 61:1 further affirms the this-worldly nature of the kingdom Jesus was proclaiming.

Both Isaiah 61 and 58 were addressed to the dysfunctional social reality of post-exilic Israel and envision a new social order in which justice would be restored. Jesus draws on this message in his Nazareth sermon, applying it his own day, since centuries later Israel was still in a similar situation. Beyond Roman oppression, Jewish society was full of political jockeying and economic inequalities. But Jesus announced that things are about to change—the kingdom of God is coming! This kingdom refers, most fundamentally, to a world conformed to God’s standards, where that which is broken is healed and society is ordered according to God’s priorities of justice, generosity, and love.

But where did this idea of the kingdom of God come from? What are its roots, its origin?

That’s the topic for the next post.

This is the second installment of a longer piece I am writing on the Kingdom of God for a volume of essays introducing Christianity to a broad, international audience (to be published by Routledge). Part 3 may be found here.