Psalm 74: Communal lament

l   Metaphors: V1: sheep of your pasture (Psalm 23, reminds us of shepherd, king, deities. Taps into an existing relationship and how that relationship will work. Sheep of your pasture and not your slaughterhouse). V19: dove (powerlessness, helplessness prey, metaphor for the people of God), wild beasts (the nations). V22: rise up oh God (on your feet, you’re been sitting with your hands in your pockets, anthropomorphic metaphor).

l   Imageries: V1: anger smoke. V4: Foes roared. V5: those who swing axes. V11: garment: fold of cloth, like hands in his pocket. There’s a job to be done and God’s not working on it. V13-14: water of chaos, cosmic battle imagery, splitting open, crushing, defeating. Why this language? Because they have just been crushed. Taps into history as well as the experience they are responding to. V16-17: Creation imageries.

l   Parallelism: V2: Congregation, Mt Zion. Contrasting V3: Everlasting vs ruins. Advancing V2: nation vs purchase vs inheritance vs Zion. V4. V7: lots of burning stuff happening. Pillar of smoke from God’s anger.

l   Repetitions: V2: Remember.

l   Time is a problem here. In what relation to those events is this poem? This is a sharp memory, sharp reality, but a distant event.

l   Progression: v4-7a there’s a dominant image, treating a beautiful wooden building as a firewood. Lots of tree imagery in the temple. Treating these previous wood as wood in the forest which you hack off to create fire.

l   Different uses of words: V1, 10, 11, what are these words doing? They’re questioning. Rhetorical questions in one sense (doesn’t require an answer), but not really because they require protection, an action, not an explanation. Asking a question of God in order to elicit a response from God.

l   2^nd person verb forms: all asking God to do something. 1^st half: describing what the enemies have done. 2^nd person finite: describing something God has done.

l   At the end: Direct, unapologetic, forceful petition. 13-17: perfect verbs. Then 18-23 a series of imperatives (either positive or negative).

l   Ideas:

n   Absence/inaction.

n   Destruction of people and place.

n   Covenant, election, salvation.

n   Victory. Kings conquer enemies in order to establish a safe and stable environment for their people.

n   Creation: God’s power and sovereignty. V12 especially. Demonstration of Yahweh’s sovereign rule. V13-15. V14 leviathan: God’s rule over cosmic order. Starts ambiguous between creation and redemption. Ends with creation. All turns to dust, but creation still stands.

l   Where it starts, where it finishes: Lamenting at what we have lost. It starts with the people and ends with God’s own name/God’s reputation, for a rhetorical purpose. People getting together for the inaction of God. Concern about how the enemies have mocked God.

l   Setting after 587BC, but before the temple’s rebuilt (or else there wouldn’t be the “everlasting ruins”). Could be written in the land after the return from exile. Could be people gathering where they used to gather for worship and seeing the rubbles of what used to be glorious. Immediacy of memory rather than physical presence.

l   The “War Stand” of Ur: Memorial of victory. Demonstrates the powerful redeeming work of God.

l   The “Perpetual ruins” (2^nd temple) are a living experience for the Jews today.

l   For what should we lament as a Christian community? What does the church lament for these days?

l   One way poems can work is in liturgy.

Psalm 44: Communal lament

l   The fact that Yahweh has acted in a certain way in the past is the reason why we’re calling for Yahweh to act in the same way.

l   If God is to act, then God is going to act against the enemies.

l   When there is a temple, it involves worship. All ritual actions associated with death here.

l   Context not clear: Probably triggered by a military disaster.

l   Not just a mourning song, but also a prayer. “Funeral blues” is a sad mourning song, but not a lament. Prayer involves a horizon beyond the grief.

l   What communal lament does: It’s not so much the laments do, but what we do with these words when we use them in lament. 1) What lament does is to address God as the “people of God”. Individualistic West: sometimes we’re not used to communal. Jesus’ prayer which he taught the disciples: it’s for communal use. 2) It ties very tightly together the fate of God’s people, God’s purposes and God’s reputation. The way God will bring all things to its designated conclusion. Gives powerful poetic expression to that reality. Owns disastrous circumstances, but this ends not as the focus of the prayer. Not just us and our plight, but about God and the world. What God is about in the world, and where God is standing. God is the sovereign Lord of history. It’s holding the mirror to God to show Him the disasters when God doesn’t act on behalf of God’s people.

l   If we use these words, we become involved in what they’re doing, and these words become our words. When we use these words, we find ourselves lamenting. The phenomenon of addressing God as “our God” in prayer expresses a fundamental element of trust. A belief in God’s own commitment to His own justice: For God to act on behalf of the poor. God can be questioned and called to account. Disparity between the realities. These poems may seem the most arrogant thing we can do/claiming of rights over God, but these poems are in the canon of Scripture. So this is an invite from God to question. It fosters alignment between our interests and commitments and God’s interests and commitments. Do our concerns line up with God? If we are lamenting, are we lamenting for the right things? Praying for righteousness in the community aligns us up with God’s purposes.

l   When we are injured, one response is anger, usually through vengeance to one that’s wronged us. What these psalms require us to entrust this to God, and for us to know (in head and heart) that it is God who will avenge. Prayers like this allow us to not turn our back on a call for righteousness to the world. It is God’s business to enact justice in the end.

l   If we pray these prayers rightly, we might become uncomfortable to find us on the wrong side of these, that we are amongst the oppressors rather than the oppressed. Advantage us on the disadvantage of others. What starts out as lament might end as penitence.