By Jill Carattini: 3/14/2020
Every human lament is a love-song,,,,,Will love one day no longer be laments?” Gracious God, please, let it be.
A woman who had a history of abuse and a difficult past had been coming for treatment and had been showing signs of healing. Yet one day the woman came in and announced what she felt was another sign of her brokenness that needed to be addressed. She described her recent tendency to cry in the presence of her physician as he showed concern for her as a person with significant health problems. She felt as thought her tears must be an indication of something more that needed to be examined.
The counselor immediately thought of the woman in the gospels who responded to Jesus with weeping, even washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. Luke writes, “[A]s she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them” (Luke 7:38). In this story, the woman’s tears were not simply an illustration of her brokenness; they were an expression of life. She was marking in gratitude the feet of the one who gave voice to the lament within her, the value within her, the humanity she uniquely bore—in the context of a love-song. The woman in counseling identified immediately with this reaction to Christ, eventually learning to see her own tears as a shared lament for a world marked by suffering and a sign of the God who knows all too well its sting.
The lament within the gospel story inasmuch as the hope of the gospel story is powerfully relevant to a weary and broken world. Aware or unaware, we live before a God who gives us permission to utter the words of loss and weariness and despair in the pits of our stomachs, even as Christ himself weeps among us. In his humanity, we are Every human lament is a love-song.” And then he asks a question that begins the outpouring that is the entire book: “Will love-songs one day no longer be laments?” Gracious God, please, let it be.
Of the woman washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. Luke writes, “[A]s she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them” (Luke 7:38). In this story, the woman’s tears were not simply an illustration of her brokenness; they were an expression of life. She was marking in gratitude the feet of the one who gave voice to the lament within her, the value within her, the humanity she uniquely bore—in the context of a love-song. The woman in counseling identified immediately with this reaction to Christ, eventually learning to see her own tears as a shared lament for a world marked by suffering and a sign of the God who knows all too well its sting.
The lament within the gospel story inasmuch as the hope of the gospel story is powerfully relevant to a weary and broken world. Aware or unaware, we live before a God who gives us permission to utter the words of loss and weariness and despair in the pits of our stomachs, even as Christ himself weeps among us. In his humanity, we are given both a mandate and a voice to decry cancerous narratives that suggest there are some less created in God’s image than others. In his invitation to take up our own crosses, we are given the way to denounce the structures of sin that keep injustice and racism and despair at play and the directive to stand with the abused and the persecuted. Yes, if human lament is a long and labored love-song, Jesus is singing there in the midst of it, perhaps at times using our own tears to call us closer to his own broken body on the cross and the promise in his scars.
This song, too, shall one day be a lament no more.given both a mandate and a voice to decry cancerous narratives that suggest there are some less created in God’s image than others. In his invitation to take up our own crosses, we are given the way to denounce the structures of sin that keep injustice and racism and despair at play and the directive to stand with the abused and the persecuted. Yes, if human lament is a long and labored love-song, Jesus is singing there in the midst of it, perhaps at times using our own tears to call us closer to his own broken body on the cross and the promise in his scars. This song, too, shall one day be a lament no more.