New Every Morning

It helps to know how carefully Lamentations is built. The book is five separate poems, and four of them are acrostics: the verses march through the Hebrew alphabet from aleph to taw, the equivalent of A to Z. That is a strange thing to do while you are drowning in grief. The poet has lost almost everything, yet he writes in the most disciplined form his language offered. I read that as a very human instinct. When the world has come apart, sometimes the only way to keep moving is to hold to a structure, to say the whole alphabet of your pain in order rather than let it dissolve into a formless cry.

The third poem, where our two verses sit, is the tightest acrostic of the five. It runs three lines per letter, sixty-six verses in all, and it stands at the very centre of the book. That placement matters. The hope is not tacked onto the end, where it might feel cheap or tidy. It is set down in the middle of the rubble, at the point where the grief is heaviest. The shape itself is doing some of the preaching.

Two Hebrew words carry most of the weight in these lines, and both are worth slowing down for. The first, rendered here as ‘loving kindnesses’, is chesed. It is one of the great words of the Old Testament, and English keeps reaching for it and falling short. It means loyal, covenant love: the settled commitment of someone who has bound themselves to you and refuses to let go. It is the love that keeps a promise long after the feelings would have packed up and left.

The second word, ‘mercies’, is rachamim, and it is quietly tender. It shares a root with the Hebrew word for a womb. So the picture underneath ‘his mercies’ is close to a mother’s gut-deep compassion for the child she has carried. That is the God the poet is describing over the ashes of his city. Not a remote administrator of justice, but One whose compassion is as instinctive and bodily as a mother’s love. I keep returning to that. The same God who let the consequences fall is the God whose mercy is named in the most intimate term the language had.

The morning is not just scenery in these verses. The reflection already points to the manna in the wilderness, the bread that came fresh each dawn and would not keep overnight, so I will not labour that. What strikes me is how far this morning pattern runs through the rest of Scripture.

Psalm 30:5, one of the cross-references here, sets weeping in the night and joy in the morning. The Gospels are careful to place the resurrection early on the first day of the week, at dawn, in a garden. The faithfulness Lamentations clings to over a burned-out Jerusalem turns out to be the same faithfulness that did not abandon Jesus to the grave. Hebrews 13:8, another of the references listed, makes the point plainly about Christ being the same yesterday, today and for ever. The poet could not have seen how far his words would carry. He simply trusted that God’s character would outlast his city. It did, and it outlasts death as well.

I want to be honest about how this verse works in a real life, because it is not a feeling. The poet never claims he woke up flooded with peace. A line earlier he makes a deliberate choice to remember, against the grain of everything in front of him. Grief and tiredness are loud, and the story they tell feels total. He answers them by calling a truer thing to mind on purpose.

Mornings, I find, are honest. The worry you took to bed is usually still sitting at the foot of it. What steadies me is not pretending the ruin has gone, because often it has not, but taking the verse at its word: the mercy I need for this one day has not been used up. I do not have to scrape together enough grace to cover the whole road ahead. I only need enough for the next few hours, and that much is already here. Yesterday’s strength was for yesterday. There is fresh bread on the table for today.

Something about these verses only lands once you notice the posture they are said from. The poet is not writing from a recovered life, looking back on a hard patch he has safely come through. The city is still ash around him as the words leave his mouth. That changes what they can carry. Hope built on good circumstances folds the moment the circumstances go, and his are already gone. The hope here has nothing underneath it but God, because everything else has been taken away. I find that oddly steadying. If a man could say ‘great is your faithfulness’ with not one thing left to point at, then the saying cannot depend on my own situation behaving itself. This is hope from the bottom rather than hope from comfort, and hope from the bottom is the only kind that holds the day you actually need it.

The manna keeps pulling me back to one small detail. In the wilderness (Exodus 16) the bread could not be stored. Gather a double portion to save yourself tomorrow’s walk, and you woke to find it spoiled. The only day you ever held enough for was the one in front of you. That is the exact rhythm of these mercies, counted out a single morning at a time. And here is the thing I once read as a limit and now read as a gift: tomorrow’s grace is simply not in my hands today. I cannot stockpile it, which quietly means I cannot be trusted to. Hand me a year of mercy in advance and I would try to live off the store and stop coming back for more. Keeping the supply daily keeps me turning up. Jesus said something close when he told us to leave tomorrow’s worries for tomorrow (Matthew 6:34); the day has enough weight of its own without my borrowing more from the next one. Thomas Chisholm heard all of this in the two lines and gave the church ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness’. I cannot honestly tell you what his own days were like as he wrote it, and I will not invent a story for him. What I can say is that the hymn has carried this verse into rooms the poet never imagined, and it has held in every one of them.

I have heard this read at a New Year service as though it meant fresh start, clean slate, this will be your year. I should be honest that this is a pattern I have watched for rather than anything I can count, but I have seen it often enough to name it. The swap is quiet and it is serious: God’s faithfulness becomes God’s intervention. The poet never says the exile ends this year, or the temple is rebuilt by Passover. What gets renewed is not the situation.

Preach it the other way and you have made a promise the text refuses to make. Sooner or later you will sit with someone whose morning brought no improvement at all, and you will have nothing honest left to say, because the thing you promised did not turn up. Worse, they may reasonably conclude the mercy did not turn up either. So preach the actual claim. His loving kindness is the reason they are not consumed. That is not a forecast that the fire is going out.

If you are teaching this passage rather than reading the familiar pair aloud, start earlier and finish later. Verses 19 and 20 lay out the complaint in full, the affliction recalled, the soul bowed down inside him. Skipping them is what makes verse 22 sound cheap. Read them slowly.

Verse 21 is the hinge, and the reflection above already quotes it: “This I recall to my mind; therefore I have hope.” Sit on that therefore. Hope here is not a mood that settles on him, it is a conclusion he reasons his way to after a deliberate act of memory, which makes it something a person in the room can actually do on Monday morning.

Then go past the card to verse 24, where he calls the LORD his portion. Portion is inheritance language. When Israel divided the land, the Levites were given no tribal territory of their own, and God himself was named as their portion instead (Numbers 18:20). So a man standing on ground burnt to rubble reaches for the claim of the landless priests: the one inheritance no invading army can torch. Complaint, chosen memory, remembered character, claimed inheritance. Teach those four in order and the therefore in verse 21 does its work, and the therefore in verse 24 earns its own.

In a UK church I can think of few readings that suit Morning Prayer better, since this is a text about the day just starting rather than a season safely behind you. It also belongs in a service held after a shared blow: a fire, a closure, a finance meeting where the numbers were grim.

Where I would hold back is a fresh bereavement, and particularly a funeral after a sudden death. Telling someone that mercies are new every morning, when their morning has just lost the person who used to be in it, can land as an instruction to hurry up and feel better. The poem itself takes its time. Twenty verses of grief come before the hinge in verse 21, and even then the poet keeps lamenting afterwards. If you do read it there, begin at verse 19 and let the complaint be heard out loud first. Give people something nearer the amount of time the poet took before you hand them the resolution.

I have to say the hard thing, because the book will not let me skip it. Lamentations 2:20 asks whether women should eat their own offspring, the children they held and bounced on their knees. Lamentations 4:10 answers it: that is what happened, when the siege shut off every other source of food. This is not some other disaster from some other poem. Same five poems, same city, same starving weeks that our two bright verses sit inside.

So when he says “we are not consumed”, I cannot let that stand as a blanket promise. It was not true of every household in Jerusalem that year. Some were consumed, in the most literal and unbearable sense the word can carry, and the man writing this knew their names.

Which makes the pronoun worth stopping over. He says we, not I. He is not claiming a personal exemption, and he is not claiming a universal one either. He is a survivor counting the other survivors, naming what kept a remnant a remnant rather than a total end. That is a true thing to say. It is simply not the same sentence as “nobody starved”.

For years I wanted this verse to cover everybody in the story. It does not. The most honest comfort I can offer is a refusal to paper over the gap: this held for him, it says nothing kind to the family in chapter 4, and I will not hand you a tidier verse than the one that was written. Oddly, that is what lets me believe the rest of it. A poet who had watched what he had watched, and still wrote verse 22, was not being sentimental. He had seen the worst case at close range and put his name to the line anyway.

Habakkuk 3:17 to 19 is the passage I keep setting beside this one, because the two are doing the same act of trust from opposite directions. Habakkuk writes with the disaster still coming. The fig tree has not yet failed to blossom, there are still cattle in the stalls, but he can see the Chaldeans being raised up (Habakkuk 1:6) and he settles in advance what he will say when the fields are empty. His faith reaches forward into a loss that has not landed.

Our poet reaches the other way. Nothing is about to fall. It has fallen. He is not bracing, and his hope is not anticipation but memory forced into the present tense.

Two kinds of courage, and I have needed both, though never on the same day. Habakkuk is the courage of the person watching the scan get booked, the consultation open, the marriage they can feel going, deciding now, before it lands, what they will still believe afterwards. Lamentations is the courage of the person for whom it has already landed and there is nothing left to brace for.

The second is harder to keep up, and here is the reason I did not see for a long time. Habakkuk gets an ending: strength, feet like a deer’s, high places, some forward motion granted on the page. Our poet is given nothing of the kind. He carries on lamenting well past verse 24, and the book does not close on resolution at all. Chapter 5 ends by asking whether God has utterly rejected them. Nobody ever tells him the fig tree blossomed again. He says great is your faithfulness into a silence, and no receipt is issued.

Jerusalem was burnt. 2 Kings 25:9 records it without softening: the house of the LORD, the king’s house, every great house in the city, put to the torch. Lamentations keeps circling back to fire, and chapter 4 verse 11 is the plainest of them, a fire kindled in Zion that has devoured its foundations. This is not a poet reaching for a vague picture of ruin. There was smoke in his clothes.

Then read the English of our verse. “We are not consumed.” Consumed is what fire does to a house, a scroll, a barn of grain. It finishes the thing, and there is nothing left to sweep up. He has watched his city consumed, quite possibly his own roof with it, and that same word comes back round to name what did not happen to the people standing in the ash.

Now the honest part, and I would rather lose the whole point than fake it. I cannot tell you the Hebrew works that way. The resonance I am hearing sits in the English, and our word “consume” carries fire in it whether or not the poet’s verb did. So this may well be a gift from the translators rather than a move by the writer, and I am not the person to settle that for you. If you want it from me straight: I do not know.

What I notice is that I still do not want to give it up, and I have worked out why. The reading holds even if the etymology is not mine to claim. The fire finished the city. It did not finish the man. Whatever the Hebrew is doing underneath, the gap between the buildings and the people is the thing the poem is actually staking everything on, and that gap is where these two verses live.

I would not open with the siege in a room with children in it. I would not pretend hard things do not happen either, because they already know that they do. A grandparent has gone. A dog has gone. A house move broke up a friendship group and nobody consulted them about any of it. Children rarely need protecting from the fact of sadness. They need somebody honest standing next to them in it.

So I would say something close to this. Some mornings the sad thing from yesterday is still there when you wake up, and sleeping did not make it go anywhere. But God’s kindness towards you did not run out while you were asleep. There is more of it waiting this morning than there was any morning before, because it never gets low. That is a promise about him. It is not a promise that the sad thing is fixed by lunchtime.

If a picture helps, I would use the tap rather than the tank. A tank runs out and then you are stuck with an empty tank. A tap joined to a spring keeps giving, however much you drew from it yesterday.

What I would never say is that praying hard enough mends the broken thing. I have watched that promise break something in people years later, when the mending did not come and the child, grown by then, concluded either that they had failed or that God had. I would rather a child grow up knowing the mercy is certain and the mending is not ours to schedule than grow up having to unlearn a neater version I gave them because I could not bear their face at the time.

For centuries the church has read Lamentations aloud in the dark of Holy Week, at a service called Tenebrae, which is just Latin for shadows. Tallis, Palestrina and Victoria all set these chapters to music, and the Lamentations of Jeremiah are a well-worn part of both the Catholic and the Anglican inheritance. I will not pretend to know which piece was sung on which day, or that every one of those settings was written for the service rather than for other use. The practice itself is not in doubt, and chapter 3 is among the portions that come round in those readings. The candles are put out one at a time as the lessons run on, until the last light is taken away and the room is left dark.

What gets me is how unhurried it is. Nobody rushes to relight anything. The service ends in the dark, with no resolution restored, because Good Friday has not turned into Easter yet and the people who built this liturgy would not pretend that it had. They had our two bright verses somewhere in the reading and they did not use them as an exit.

That is a rebuke to the way I use this verse, and I mean me specifically. I reach for it to close a hard conversation down, and if I am honest it is my own discomfort I am ending, not the other person’s. The church that has carried these words the longest built an entire service around not doing that. It sat in the dark on purpose, for as long as the dark deserved, and trusted the light to come back without being forced.

• What is the first story your grief or worry tells you when you wake, and what truer thing could you deliberately set against it?
• Where are you trying to make yesterday’s grace stretch to cover a day it was never given for?
• The poet said ‘great is your faithfulness’ while his city still lay in ruins. Is there a place where you could say something like that before anything has been fixed?
• If God’s mercy for you really is as instinctive as a mother’s compassion, where have you quietly been picturing him as colder than he is?

If one of these has found you this morning, you might sit a while longer with the rest of Lamentations, or follow the thread of comfort and hope through more verses arranged by how you feel.