When Cries of Distress are All You Can Utter [Lament as Hope in Psalm 120]
Think positive. Hope for the best. It’ll all work out.
I read tweets and Instagram posts with those kinds of phrases, and the cynic in me shakes my head. The optimism can be helpful at times, I suppose. At the very least, those words reveal our craving for hope. We long for something different than the brokenness we see around us. But those phrases are like candy. They may perk us up for a moment, but they will never sustain.
Other times we hear verses recited like, “All things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). We know that message is true, and we believe it. But at the moment phrases like, “Woe to me!”[1] or “Out of the depths I cry!”[2] feel more accurate to the stirrings of our souls. We wish we could tie our sad stories up in a bow, find a solution, or tack on a happy ending. But grief, pain, loss, fear, and heartache cling to us like a snare, and for many of us, cries of distress are all we can utter.
The author of Psalm 120 knows distress. He knows the feeling of being desperate for God to intervene as he calls out in the opening verses, “Deliver me!” If there’s one phrase our world is crying out in unison right now, that may be it. We want healing, rest, security, and deliverance. We’ve all lost something—maybe even someone—during this pandemic, and we’re longing for change. “Deliver us, God! Do something!” we beg.
Our hearts feel heavy, our bodies tired, our souls weary, and Psalm 120 reminds us that even in our darkest moments we can cry out to the God who delivers. These words help us look around and grieve where we are, and then plead with God to do something about it.
Learning to Lament
All through Scripture, God gives us the language of lament to relate to him during these seasons. Lament helps us draw near to God in our grief and gives us words to cry out in our distress. And as we turn to him in our mourning, we’re reminded of the truth of who he is—the God who delivers.
“Even in our darkest moments we can cry out to the God who delivers.”
Psalm 120 is a cry of lament from start to finish. The psalmist prays for God to deliver him from lies, violence, and deceit, and even goes so far as to ask God for judgment on the deceiver. Psalm 120:5 starts, “Woe to me!” It’s a cry of sadness, often used in funeral processions or oracles of judgment. In short, the psalmist would rather be dead than be where he is. He mourns the fact that he’s far from the place where God dwells. He’s in a land of violence and oppression (verses 5-6), and he despairs being distant from God’s people and God’s presence in the temple. Those around him only want war and he wants shalom, not just the absence of violence but true, lasting peace, restoration, and justice (verse 7).
It’s not an easy psalm to stomach. But laments are, at their core, words of hope. Bernard W. Anderson writes, “(T)he laments are really expressions of praise, offered in a minor key in the confidence that Yhwh is faithful and in anticipation of a new lease on life.”[3] If the author had no hope, there would be no point in crying out. Instead, the psalmist cries before God, begging him for deliverance. He believes, even if faintly, that Yahweh is able to deliver.
Lament reminds us we have a God to cry to. It lifts our eyes to help us see that this is not the way it should be, that there has to be something different. Lament allows us to look directly at the grief rather than recoiling in shallow optimism.
“In my distress I called to the LORD,” the psalmist cried. That’s lament, simple and raw.
When God Doesn’t Answer
Sometimes during dark seasons, though, I’ve felt like God shrugs his shoulders with indifference while I mourn and wrestle and weep. If he could do something, why hasn’t he? I cry out to God in my distress and hear silence in return.
Psalm 120:1 declares with such confidence that the LORD answered. “In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me” (italics added). So what was the answer? It’d be nice to know what God said. When we cry out to God in our distress, what will he say? Will he say anything? Many psalms, even those starting with sorrow, end with a joyful verse of praise. This one does not. It ends with the psalmist still feeling far from God and weeping over the realities around him.
On Christmas Day, 2010, my mom had surgery for what turned out to be pancreatic cancer. For the following months, years even, I wept and cried out to God harder than I ever had before. I begged him for answers, for healing, for a better understanding of why he would do something like this. I knew people suffered with cancer all the time, but this was the most personal encounter I’d had with the disease. In my distress I called to the LORD.
He didn’t seem to answer.
Six months after my mom was diagnosed, I pulled my phone out of my pocket as it buzzed. My shoulders slumped as I saw my parents’ number. By that point, I dreaded when they called. It often seemed to be bad news, and even if it wasn’t, talking to them reminded me how hard things were at that point for my mom. This time, though, it wasn’t about her.
The doctor had concerns about my dad’s recent blood work. I remember walking from a coffee shop to my office at the time, and after I hung up the phone I literally threw up my hands and yelled, “Here we go again.”
Doctors soon diagnosed my dad with cancer—multiple myeloma, a relatively treatable kind, they assured. Despite a decent prognosis for him, both my parents spent the following months undergoing varying levels of treatment. My siblings and I swapped off helping out, and I flew from Chicago to New Jersey as often as I could to do my part. I sat with my mom during chemo and “worked from home” in my dad’s hospital room. I occasionally went to an oncology appointment with them—a joint appointment, because when you both have cancer, why not schedule your doctors’ visits together?
The answer God gave to the cries about my mom seemed to only be met with more grief. Was this a cruel joke?
I like clear answers. I’m notoriously bad at waiting. Those three dots that show up on your phone when someone’s typing a text drive me crazy. I need to know what they’re going to say, and I need to know it now. Don’t make me wait.
I’m like that with God. Seasons of waiting leave me feeling anxious and worried when I long for closure and peace. If I know the end is in sight or when I can see the finish line, maybe I can endure. But when the waiting season has no time limit, when the unknowns weigh heavily on me, overwhelm and fear creep in.
“Our hope is not a heady philosophy or pie-in-the-sky ideology. It’s not shallow optimism or cliche phrases. It’s a reality rooted in the person and work of the God who delivers.”
Even after Psalm 120 says, “and he answered me,” the rest is words of mourning and distress all the way through. There’s no answer given, just the assurance that he did. How do we hold onto hope and trust the God who delivers as we wait for answers? Holding onto hope sometimes feels more like trying to hold onto the wind.
But our hope is not a heady philosophy or pie-in-the-sky ideology. It’s not shallow optimism or cliche phrases. It’s a reality rooted in the person and work of the God who delivers.
I can only imagine the depth of sorrow that Jesus’ mother, disciples, and friends felt when they watched him die a criminal’s death. Just over thirty years earlier, Mary, the same woman who knew the miracle of his conception, sang, "For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed" (Luke 1:48). But standing before that cross, God seemed powerless to deliver them. He failed. He was silent. This man who was supposed to be an answer to Israel’s bondage, to all the prophecies of the Old Testament, hung on a cross. The supposed Messiah lay in a tomb while his disciples hid in fear.
The people had cried to the LORD for generations, and apparently he didn’t answer. Where was God?
He was about to raise the dead.
Two years after my mom’s diagnosis, I sat with my family in my mom’s bedroom. We watched her chest heave up and down and listened to her labored breaths. At about 10:30am all was quiet, except for our own weeping.
I haven’t yet seen God raise the dead. But he is no less active and attentive in our lives than he was in Israel thousands of years ago. We worship the same God who parted the Red Sea, provided manna in the desert, and burned up Elijah’s sacrifice on Mt. Carmel with fire from heaven—and he’s the same God who raised Jesus from the dead. The empty tomb didn’t happen through mere optimism. It happened by the power of our God who conquered sin and death itself.
Joshua 21:45 says, “Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass.” That remained true for Israel, and it is true for all of God’s people now. He will answer. He will deliver. It is who he is: He is a delivering God.
This is Not the End
In the meantime, God invites our crying out. He invites our mourning and wrestling. He invites us to call to him, and he will answer. He has promised to deliver us, and he already has through Christ. He will come again and make all things new, and he will restore what’s been broken. And sometimes, as N.T. Wright wrote, “The only thing to do is to hold the spectacular promises in one hand and the messy reality in the other and praise Yhwh anyway.”[4]
“The only thing to do is to hold the spectacular promises in one hand and the messy reality in the other and praise Yhwh anyway.”
This psalm is the first in a pilgrimage to God’s presence. It’s part of the Psalms of Ascent, a group of psalms (120-134) written separately but edited together and believed to be sung by Jewish pilgrims traveling to the temple in Jerusalem for feasts and festivals. Psalm 120 marks the beginning of our travels, and while grief and sorrow may arise all each step of the way, this is not the end.
As we think about how these psalms were often sung, together as a community while journeying to worship, it’s worth peeking ahead at what comes next. This one ends, “I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!”
And so we turn the page. “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.”[5]
The journey is just getting started.
[1] Psalm 120:5
[2] Psalm 130:1
[3] Anderson, Bernhard W., and Steven Bishop. Out of the Depths: the Psalms Speak for Us Today. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000, 60.
[4] Wright, N. T. Evil and the Justice of God. Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2014, 60.
[5] Psalm 121:1-2
Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash
