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"Emmanuel: Glimpses of God Incarnate," December 12
Sunday, December 12
Lamentations 2:2-5
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“God as Enemy”
THIS DEVOTIONAL INVITES US TO REFLECT on what different scriptural images tell us about God who was born into our world. I admit I do not think of the image of God as enemy at Christmastide. But the image of enemy brings another image to mind. I will come to that.
The book of Lamentations is five chapters, five lyric poems of lament. These particular verses are among the most vitriolic of the entire book, detailing what God the warrior has wrought against Jerusalem. The narrator laments the anguish of a suffering people and the razing of the holy city and its Temple by invading armies. Verse after verse attribute this devastation and horror to God. And more: not only is God the enemy, God is also the unresponsive enemy. Unlike the book of Job, God remains silent in Lamentations.
Some interpreters want me, the reader, to be assured that I, too, can lament, that Christian communities can lament, that lament is a faithful part of being in relationship with God. The book of Lamentations is rightly used this way by both Jews and Christians during annual services when the book is read for what it is, as lament and as funeral dirge. And yet the accusations against God make me wonder again—why did God not stop such destruction and death? Was God their enemy? Is God our enemy?
This is not what I think about at Christmastide.
Except. Except that, for those of us using an old pattern of readings in the church we will hear outright frightful texts in the early weeks of Advent. The gospel readings announce images of divine judgment, wrath, and destruction. Surely God is as enemy in those texts, too. But an enemy of injustice, of unrighteousness.
God as enemy makes me think of God as judge, the coming of Christ in judgment, of Christ born as enemy to sin and death. If this is what God as enemy means then I hope to stand watchful, awake, and busy with “least-of-these” discipleship at the day of Christ’s coming, which we await.
– Rev. Dr. Jennifer L. Lord, The Dorothy B. Vickery Professor of Homiletics and Liturgical Studies
