Lamentations 3:44 An Exegesis

You have wrapped yourself with a cloud

so that no prayer can pass through. 

Who hasn't felt this way?  Several years ago, after Mother Teresa's death, it was revealed that for a good part of her life, she felt wrapped in a dark lonely silence, abandoned by God.  The more she longed to feel God, the more she felt a forsaken despair.  This is the prayer expressed in Lamentations 3:44.  It is similar to the cry of Jesus on the cross when he cried "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?  St. John of the cross wrote, "...there is that separation, that terrible emptiness, that feeling of absence of God.

In this video exegesis, a friend of mine, Ed Sackett and several student at Austin Theological Seminary tackle an exegesis of this text in a video format.  I don't know that I have ever watched a video exegesis before.  Exegesis has been in my experience a task presented only in print form.  This is exegesis begins to engage this critical question of the distance of God in Lam 3:44.  

We are now beginning the season of Lent.  This Sunday we will celebrate Transfiguration Sunday, the day when the cloud was pulled back and just for one moment, the disciples witness a miraculous 'transfiguration', a pulling back of the darkness to witness Jesus in His glory.  Yet too often, after those moments of illumination we feel like the disciples must have, after the vision passes, and Jesus is left standing alone again, with his disciples, walking down into the valley and towards Golgotha.  It will be during the crucifixion that the mystery of the silence of God confronts us.  

Our natural tendency may be to dismiss this question, yet its amazing how often this question is asked in scripture, put out there waiting for us to pick it up if we have not already encountered it.  Yet we are reminded by the transfiguration story, that we must again and again, focus our eyes, on the chosen One, on the one who comes in the name of the Lord, the one who comes through suffering and death, who also knew abandonment and loneliness, to bring us into the Presence of God and into the Communion of the Saints even in our own dark night of the soul.