Lamentations 3: 19-23

Matthew 20:17-end

From this pulpit some six feet above contradiction as the saying goes, there is no escape from the very present theme of restoration here in the Cathedral, for in direct line of the preacher’s view there is this Royal Coat of Arms  – not a premature step before our new King’s coronation in May, but to mark his immediate Carolingian predecessor Charles the ll‘s coronation in 1660. It was the practice to have royal coats of arms in churches after the reformation as a reminder of the sovereign as head of the Church of England but particularly so, much later with the demise of Oliver Cromwell. Fortunately, his son Richard, though expected to succeed his father as Second Lord Protector, had no appetite or ability to sustain his father’s legacy and thankfully the monarchy was restored. Lament is much in our minds this evening but there was by 1660 little of that for the Roundhead regime. I think such regalia as we have just below our organ here are helpful in giving us a sense of identity and belonging, an enhancing of tradition and heritage and if we think about it for more than a moment, an assurance of a personal restoration and renewed health and indeed faith. 

Our Old Testament reading this evening is not set in a land of milk and honey but in a land of exile and despair. And thinking about health I wonder what you make of Jeremiah, possibly the writer of some the five poems that we know as the Lamentations of Jeremiah though given the is real doubt about if he really was the author, I can’t help but associate him with the grey misery of the Roundheads.  

Some 2,500 years ago in 600 years BC when the Israelites were very unhappily under the cosh of the Babylonians and their city of Jerusalem was in ruins including the Temple, Jeremiah’s lamenting poetry is seemingly the stuff of unending sadness and of God’s chosen people being neglected by God. In this context, Jeremiah asks the question ‘O daughter Jerusalem, for vast as the sea is your ruin – who can heal you?.

In a sense this is at the heart of our thoughts on this penultimate Sunday evening in Lent as we consider healing and restoration.

The book Lamentations is an almost unrelenting description of misery and despair. And in the one previous to that containing our text this evening, it begs the question Who will heal you? – that is, who will heal the people of Zion in their agony?

They believe they are being punished by God and their desperation is God’s retribution.

But there is a legitimate role and place for lament, and this is especially appropriate on this Passion Sunday as we enter the last two weeks of Lent culminating in the desperate tragedy of Good Friday. Think of the anthem known as the Lamentations of Jeremiah that our choirs sing in Holy Week with music by Edward Bairstow. It ends with those arresting lines Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return unto the Lord thy God. Jerusalem as that symbol of the centre and focus of Judaism and their worship of God. 

But why was God seemingly punishing his chosen people?

Jesus himself uses a sort of lament for Jerusalem as he prepares to enter the city for that fatal weak of his ministry.

Now, I’d like us to consider or rather imagine for a moment at least, that these words we have been considering from Lamentations were the words not of the writer of Lamentations but the words of Jesus on the cross: We are familiar with Jesus’ ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? whilst on the cross  in Calvary, and here in Babylon, 600 years earlier was the same neglect and abandonment, here is despair and seemingly the end; where is God? 

And yet, in the third poem that forms our text from Lamentations, the sunshine does break through albeit briefly, and we have this little nugget of God’s faithfulness: But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope (that) the steadfastness of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end, they are new every morning, great is his faithfulness’ – words that still resonate in our regular prayers today. Was this God; is this God - working his purposes out in their lives then and in our lives today? 

So a question we might ask ourselves is ‘can ‘lament’ be a key to our personal restoration to God and thus a healing of our sense of separation from him?’

In our New Testament reading we hear about Jesus beginning his fateful journey to Jerusalem, the beginning of his own passion, which could be described as a form of lament before the tragedy of Holy Week. A sort of prediction of travails to come. We can detect our saviour’s own lament when he says to his disciples  ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified; and on the third day he will be raised’.   

So Jesus was announcing Jerusalem as the place of his death and passion.                                                  

But our reading this evening guides us to Jesus’ story as one of passion in the sense of being ‘passive’ and servile for the sake not only of his disciples but the whole world – the servant king.                                                                                                                                                                            

At first this Gospel reading is a jarring, uncomfortable story of a pushy mother who wants the best for her sons, but Jesus gently reminds her and the disciples that they don’t know what they are asking for. But what this very human ‘proud mum’ episode does is that it enables Jesus to set out not only what he will be going through in the immediate coming days, but also for those who become his followers as Christians. We can imagine the scene with Mrs Zebedee kneeling before Jesus with her sons James and John amongst the disciples, embarrassingly  arching their necks to hear what Jesus has in store for them and sensing their fellow disciples’ cries of ‘favouritism’.  And it’s not what any of them were expecting to hear; instead, it is the prediction of the worst possible outcomes. They say they are prepared for their fate, but they are over-confident of their own abilities, and we only need to think about subsequent events just a few days later, when Jesus is arrested in the garden of Gethsemane and they all run away – so much for being able to ‘drink the same cup as Jesus’.      

Even martyrdom which Jesus predicts will not earn them greater brownie points and gain the disciples the special places they think they want and deserve,                                                                                               

Christianity is not a meritocracy.                                                                                                                                      

Jesus deals with where they sit in eternity by explaining that it is above his pay grade as it were – it’s a decision for God the Father. His concern is for the world on earth here and now, to which he was sent by his father to save and for his disciples who will continue his mission without his physical presence, with all that that means and incurs.                                                                                                           

For his disciples that means sharing in Jesus’ and indeed the world’s suffering.  But to do this they have to have a different attitude – not one of competitive favouritism but one of servanthood, just as he had an alternative vision of kingship – the servant king. Jesus is the model for the disciples’ own lives and a model for us too. The story at the end of our reading about the two blind men whom Jesus healed as they were leaving Jericho, is not only a lovely story for its own sake and especially for those who could now see, but also a reminder of the blindness of the disciples that they too must have their blindness cured by Jesus, before they can see the new way of life to which Christian discipleship calls them – and indeed us too, as we, with Christ re-enter the events of his passion, healed and restored.

Amen