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Seumas Macdonald's avatar

I'm enjoying this series overall. Here are a couple of push-backs on this post in particular.

1. The Psalms generally avoid highly specific situations, they seem to deal much more with broader categories. This does seem to lend them to greater 'adaptability' to individual circumstances.

2. Your points about death and society more broadly are well made across the four-parts so far, but I think we want to hold some theological tensions. That is, death might be common to human existence in our world, but it's also a profoundly 'wrong' thing in the world, and so seeing individual death as disorienting precisely because every death shouts at us that the order of the universe is broken and death _should not be_, ought (in my view) be part of what lament at death is about. In that sense, there is a merger between lament at injustice and lament at death.

3. Arguably the book of lamentations is a lament at, among other things, deaths on a very large scale.

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Lucy Coppes's avatar

Since a lot of the Psalms were written by King David and are concerning the Israel as a nation, it is natural to see lament framed as injustice directed towards Israel from its enemies or expressing destress at the decline of holiness within the nation. The New Testament doesn't have Psalms however we see Jesus reaching out and responding to the injustice of sickness and death itself, which haunts all of us.

“Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.”

Jesus walked among the commoners, people who may had have a basic education or none at. If Martha and Mary were poets, they would know how to turn that phrase into prose and it would be the beginning of a beautiful Psalm. Since they were never trained in that literacy skill, we just have their direct words instead. :)

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