Silence of the Lambs (2)
Let him sit alone and be silent since He has laid it on him. Lamentations 3:28 NASB
Since – Like good Hebrew exegesis, we start at the end to discover the beginning. No sense beginning at the beginning since Hebrew has a way of turning the tale upside-down at the end. So let’s start where it ends in order to see why it begins. And when we start at the end we immediately find something unexpected. In this book of poems about destruction, we find a silence that God lays on us. In other words, this isn’t self-constructed meditation. It isn’t personal calming exercises or letting our minds draw a blank. This is a divinely initiated emptiness. The Hebrew conjunction, ki, has a wide range of possible translations, but they all come down to this: relationship, that is, how one thing is related to another. In this verse, the man sits alone because God has burdened him with silence. The verb is nāṭal, “to weigh down, to burden, to bear,” but (not too surprisingly in Hebrew) also “to lift.” This is godly depression.
“What? Are you saying that God makes me feel depressed on purpose?” Yes, in this case, that’s right. Oh, there are lots of reasons for you to run to depression as an escape from your burdens, but this isn’t what God is doing here. Your burdens can be carried to Him and left there. This isn’t one of them. This is God’s burden, gently placed on your shoulders. It is the burden of His silence over the necessity of punishment, of the destruction of His city and nation. It is the burden of knowing that His people have come to the end of His hopes for them, and now the tide must turn. This is silent weeping over the chicks that would not be gathered.
Too often we read poems like this one as if they were about us as if we were the major players in the drama. But I’m not so sure that is the case here. It seems to me that the real protagonist in this poem is God. Yes, we might be that man who sits alone in silence, but it is not our silence that penetrates. It is God’s. He is left with nothing more to say. For centuries He pleaded with His children to walk the path. For centuries they refused. And now there is nothing left but the silence of the lambs marching off to Babylon as the final step toward teshuvah. They will return—changed forever—but this path, the path of destruction, is not a joyous one. It is the fateful silence of forced submission when God would much rather have had joyful cooperation.
Perhaps this verse does have something to say to us personally. Perhaps it is a reminder that the day may come when God’s burden for our cooperation is turned to the weight of divine silence, when we also face exile because of our resistance to His care. If He did not spare the nation, what makes us think He will not also lead us to the place where words fail and we are left alone wishing we could remember when He last spoke?
Topical Index: since, ki, silence, exile, Lamentations 3:28
