December 15

Mercy Does Not Wait

Lamentations is an alphabet poem, written over a city that had been destroyed. Each verse of its first four chapters begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet in order, and in the chapter these lines come from, each letter takes three verses in a row. Someone in the middle of that loss sat down and counted letters.

Whoever kept that pattern was holding the shape together by hand, line after line, while the thing he was writing about went on being true. The turn comes partway through, and it is deliberate. He says he recalls something to mind, and that this is why he has hope. He goes and fetches what he knows about God and sets it down in front of himself, with everything around him unchanged.

This I recall to my mind; therefore I have hope. It is because of the Lord's loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion does not fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul; therefore I will hope in him. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good that a man should hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.

Lamentations 3:21-26

He credits their survival to the Lord's loving kindnesses, and says that his compassion does not fail. Those mercies are new every morning, and they were new in the mornings of a city nobody had begun to rebuild. Mercy does not wait for the ruins to be cleared.

The next line has the Lord as his portion. The word he uses is the word for an allotted share, the piece of land a family was given and lived off and handed on, and he writes it in a country that had been overrun. It is his soul that stakes the claim. Whatever else has been taken from him, the portion he names stays where it is, out of anyone's reach, and so his hope has somewhere to go.

Lamentations belongs to Holy Week in the Western church's calendar, read in services that extinguish the candles in turn, on the nights before Easter is announced. The church set these words in the one stretch of its year that is kept from inside a death, before anything has turned, and that is where it judged they belonged. Christmas keeps the same timing. God came into the world in an occupied country, among people who had no power to fix it, and the mercy was given while the trouble was going on.

The mercy this poem counts on is dated to the morning, and the morning is near enough to reach. Whatever is still true when you wake, God's compassion will be new again, as it was today whether you felt it or not. Then the same the day after that. Take them one at a time, which is how they come, and let tomorrow be the whole of what you ask for.

Lord, I bring you what I am carrying. Meet me in the morning with the mercy you have already set there. You are my portion, and I will wait for you. Great is your faithfulness.