“Our” is the word that gathers the last chapter of Lamentations: our inheritance, our houses, our mothers, our water, our bread. Loss has entered everything that once made life familiar. Even water must be bought, and bread may cost a life. Yet these people still say “O Lord.” Before they know what restoration will look like, they bring the life they actually have into His presence.
The fifth poem has twenty-two verses, corresponding to the number of Hebrew letters, but it does not follow the alphabetic acrostic of the earlier poems.1 Its form is communal prayer. The speaking “I” of earlier chapters has become a wounded “we,” capable both of naming what has been done to the people and of confessing what they themselves have done. At the end they will ask for something deeper than the recovery of houses or a crown: that God turn them toward Himself.
Remember, O Lord, what has happened to us (Lamentations 5:1-10)
Before the reading: Brenton places the burden “on our neck” at the end of verse 4, while the NKJV connects the neck image with verse 5. The verse break divides the clauses differently; neither the burden nor the following weariness has been left out.
1 Remember, O Lord, what has happened to us: behold, and look on our reproach.
2 Our inheritance has been turned away to aliens, our houses to strangers:
3 we are become orphans, we have no father, our mothers are as widows.
4 We have drunk our water for money; our wood is sold to us for a burden on our neck:
5 we have been persecuted, we have laboured, we have had no rest.
6 Egypt gave the hand to us, Assur to their own satisfaction.
7 Our fathers sinned, and are not: we have borne their iniquities.
8 Servants have ruled over us: there is none to ransom us out of their hand.
9 We shall bring in our bread with danger of our lives, because of the sword of the wilderness.
10 Our skin is blackened like an oven; they are convulsed, because of the storms of famine.
“Remember” is the first petition. The people ask God to behold their reproach and act toward them in mercy. They do not begin with a theory about suffering. They put the losses before Him. Prayer becomes truthful when it gives God the thing we would rather conceal, including our exhaustion, humiliation, and inability to make sense of what has happened.
The repeated “our” makes displacement personal. A house is occupied by someone else; inheritance no longer shelters the family to which it belonged. Orphanhood and widowhood describe a community stripped of protection. Even water and wood, the materials of ordinary survival, are now a burden. Verse 5 gives the condition its starkest measure: labor without rest. The people can still work, but they cannot secure a life in which their work leads to peace.
Verse 6 names Egypt and Assur in a world of unequal dependence. Help from great powers belongs within this prayer because the people’s daily life has become entangled with forces they cannot control. The cry is more than nostalgia for lost comfort. It asks God to see what life becomes when people lack freedom, protection, and anyone able to ransom them from the rulers of verse 8. By verse 9 even bringing home bread exposes them to the sword.
Then comes a sentence that can trouble a wounded conscience: “Our fathers sinned, and are not: we have borne their iniquities.” Children can inherit the consequences of wrongs they never chose. A parent’s violence, a household’s entrenched resentments, a public injustice, or a leader’s betrayal can shape lives long after those responsible have gone. Naming that inheritance is part of telling the truth. It need not become a verdict that the next generation is personally guilty of every ancestral act.
Ezekiel 18 makes that distinction sharply. It describes a son who sees his father’s sins and refuses to repeat them (Ezekiel 18:14-17), then declares that the son does not bear the father’s iniquity as his own guilt (Ezekiel 18:20). The same chapter calls the sinner to turn and live (Ezekiel 18:21-23).2 Lamentations describes the burden left by earlier sin; Ezekiel guards personal responsibility before God. Together they keep us from fatalism. What has wounded a family may be inherited; the obligation to continue the wound is not.
The prayer will also say, “we have sinned” in verse 16. Its honesty grows in both directions. We can grieve another generation’s wrongs and still answer for our own choices. Confession begins when the story of what others did ceases to be an excuse for what we are doing now. Grace gives a person the freedom to become, within a damaged inheritance, someone through whom the damage begins to be healed.
The fallen crown and the silenced city (Lamentations 5:11-18)
11 They humbled the women in Sion, the virgins in the cities of Juda.
12 Princes were hanged up by their hands: the elders were not honoured.
13 The chosen men lifted up the voice in weeping, and the youths fainted under the wood.
14 And the elders ceased from the gate, the chosen men ceased from their music.
15 The joy of our heart has ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.
16 The crown has fallen from our head: yea, woe to us! for we have sinned.
17 For this has grief come; our heart is sorrowful: for this our eyes are darkened.
18 Over the mountain of Sion, because it is made desolate, foxes have walked therein.
Verse 11 names sexual violence in the language of humiliation: women and virgins have been violated. The victims have lost neither their dignity nor their worth before God. The guilt belongs to those who inflicted the violence. The community’s later confession must never be used to assign that guilt to the assaulted, demand silence, or pressure them into unsafe contact with an abuser. Faithful care seeks protection and appropriate help, respects the wounded person’s agency, and refuses to shield the powerful at their expense.
The following verses show a whole public life being broken. Princes are exposed to violence, elders receive no honor, and youths collapse beneath burdens. The elders are no longer at the gate, where the community’s affairs were heard; young men no longer make music. Loss has reached both judgment and joy. A city is more than standing buildings. It also lives through the protection of its people, the wisdom of its elders, and the sound of celebration. Here those signs of common life have fallen silent.
Then the voice turns inward: “The crown has fallen from our head.” The people speak of the crown together. Royal dignity has been lost, but the wound belongs to the whole community. The next words resist the temptation to explain everything through the cruelty of outsiders: “woe to us! for we have sinned.” This is confession without the erasure of injustice. The people can name crimes committed against them while acknowledging their own need for mercy.
For us, this is a demanding form of prayer. We often find it easier to speak either as the injured or as the guilty. Lamentations allows a community to be both without confusing the two. Someone else’s wrongdoing does not absolve our resentment, dishonesty, or refusal to help. Our sins do not make the wrong done to us good. Each truth has its proper place before the God who judges justly and heals without falsehood.
The foxes walking on Mount Zion close the account of desolation. The place around which the people’s worship and identity were gathered is no longer filled with their life. In Lamentations 4, the gold lay in the streets and the king was captured. Here the silence has settled upon the holy mountain itself. The question of hope must now be carried to a throne that the enemy has not overthrown.
Turn us, O Lord, and we shall be turned (Lamentations 5:19-22)
19 But thou, O Lord, shalt dwell for ever; thy throne shall endure to generation and generation.
20 Wherefore wilt thou utterly forget us, and abandon us a long time?
21 Turn us, O Lord, to thee, and we shall be turned; and renew our days as before.
22 For thou hast indeed rejected us; thou hast been very wroth against us.
“But thou, O Lord” changes the horizon of the prayer. The crown has fallen from the people’s head, but God’s throne endures from generation to generation. The contrast does not make their losses small. It gives those losses somewhere to be brought. If the Lord’s reign had fallen with Jerusalem, there would be no one left to whom they could appeal.
The next verse shows how searching that appeal remains. The people confess God’s enduring throne and immediately ask why He has forgotten and abandoned them. Faith has not removed the experience of absence. Instead, it has given that experience an addressee. “Wherefore” is spoken to God, not beyond Him. Even the question remains a form of relationship.
The heart of the prayer comes in verse 21: “Turn us, O Lord, to thee, and we shall be turned.” The desired restoration is personal before it is political. They ask to be turned to Him. The houses, rest, music, and crown matter, but the deepest loss would be to recover all of them while remaining estranged from the Lord. Repentance is return to the One who gives life, not merely regret that sin has become costly.
The petition also tells the truth about our will. We can recognize a sin and still find ourselves defending it; we can long for reconciliation and keep rehearsing the offense that prevents us from seeking it. “Turn us” asks God to enter that division and heal it. His grace awakens, strengthens, and restores our capacity to consent. He does not repent in our place. He enables us to repent as persons who can freely love Him.
This is the cooperation with grace that Orthodox Christians call synergy. God is the giver of the healing, and we respond with the life He enables us to offer. The person praying for freedom from bitterness can stop repeating an accusation, ask for help in confession, and begin a difficult act of charity. The person praying for honesty can tell the truth and repair what can be repaired. Such obedience does not purchase the grace of return. It receives that grace through an actual turning of the heart, mouth, and hands. Waiting to feel changed before obeying can become another way of refusing the gift.
“Renew our days as before” therefore reaches beyond the wish to have the old circumstances back. The prayer asks for days lived again before God’s face. Some losses cannot be undone in this life, and repentance cannot be measured by whether every former comfort returns. The renewal for which the Church prays is life with Christ, able to bear fruit even in circumstances still marked by grief.
Then comes verse 22. The book ends with rejection and wrath still spoken aloud. Verse 21 is its great petition, but it is not its final line. We must hear both. Christian faith receives this prayer in the light of Christ’s death and Resurrection, yet it cannot require every suffering person to experience that hope as immediate relief. The risen Lord gives us reason to remain before Him while the wound is open. Lamentations ends with the people still speaking to the One whose answer they need.
The Church’s Voice in Worship ⛪
At Bright Saturday’s Midnight Praises, the Church chants the “Praise of the Prophet Jeremiah,” Lamentations 5:16-22. Coptic Reader places the confession of the fallen crown, the appeal to God’s enduring throne, and the plea for renewal together within the praises of Joyous Saturday.3
On the night of Christ’s rest in the tomb, these words become prayer on the threshold of the Resurrection. The Church does not hurry past the confession “we have sinned” to reach “renew our days.” She prays the whole passage, including its final cry. Hope is already present in the Lord to whom she sings, while the words still carry the sorrow of those awaiting His answer. We can enter that praise with a grief that has not yet become joy, asking the crucified and risen Christ to turn us toward Himself.
Spiritual Fruit 🍇
Bring the particular loss into prayer. The chapter names water, wood, bread, houses, work, and music. Take one burden that has become too familiar to mention to God. Name it without making it sound more noble than it is. If someone has no words left, intercede with them simply: “Remember, O Lord.” Prayer does not require a finished explanation before it can become true.
Refuse to make inherited pain your destiny. Verse 7 can give language to a burden carried from earlier generations. Verse 16 calls each of us to answer for our own sin. With the help of confession and wise counsel, distinguish what was done to you from what you now choose. Then identify one pattern you can refuse to pass on: an angry silence, a humiliating joke, a habit of dishonesty, or the use of fear to control another person. The grace of Christ can begin a different history through a very small act of truth.
Pray for return, then take the next obedient step. Use verse 21 before confession or at the beginning of the day. Ask the Lord to turn the will that has grown tired of struggling, and place before Him one concrete act of consent. Make the apology without adding a defense. Return what was taken. Seek help where isolation has strengthened a recurring sin. These steps express dependence on grace rather than confidence in self-repair.
The music has ceased, and foxes walk on the mountain. Still the people address the Lord whose throne remains. Stand with them without pretending that every grief has found its answer. Pray, “Turn us,” and offer Him the next small consent of your will. The final cry may remain unfinished; it is still being spoken to God.
Teaching Notes
Remember, O Lord, what has happened to us (Lamentations 5:1-10)
- Ask: Which repeated uses of “our” show how catastrophe has entered ordinary life?
- Emphasize: Verse 7 names the burden of earlier sin; verse 16 confesses the present community’s own sin. Read them together with Ezekiel 18:14-23.
- Watch for: Distinguish inherited consequences from transferred personal guilt. Avoid making family suffering proof of a particular ancestor’s sin.
- Connect: Prayer can name material deprivation directly. Intercession for those in need should lead to help with their actual burdens.
The fallen crown and the silenced city (Lamentations 5:11-18)
- Ask: What makes a community alive besides its buildings? What disappears when elders, music, and public honor are silenced?
- Emphasize: The confession in verse 16 is the people’s own speech before God, not an outsider’s diagnosis of another person’s suffering.
- Connect: Invite an examination of how a parish can recover truthful judgment, care for vulnerable people, and shared joy without pretending the wounds are already healed.
Turn us, O Lord, and we shall be turned (Lamentations 5:19-22)
- Ask: How can verse 19 and verse 20 be prayed by the same faithful person? What does asking to be turned “to thee” add to the wish for better circumstances?
- Emphasize: Explain synergy as our real, free cooperation with God’s enabling grace. Let participants name one act of obedience that could accompany the petition of verse 21.
- Watch for: Do not end the reading at verse 21 or manufacture an emotional resolution. The final line is verse 22.
- Connect: Receive the prayer before Christ crucified and risen while allowing grief to remain honest. Hope in Him does not require a sufferer to claim relief that has not yet come.
- Worship: Coptic Reader calls the selection “Praise of the Prophet Jeremiah,” not “Prayer of Jeremiah.” The verified placement is Midnight Praises on Joyous Saturday, also called Bright Saturday; distinguish the Church’s liturgical reception from an immediate emotional resolution of the poem.
Sources
Embedded Scripture is from Brenton’s English Septuagint (LXX). The reading follows the 1879 printed edition, Lamentations, pp. 972-979.
Ezekiel 18:14-23 in Brenton’s Septuagint, on personal responsibility, refusal to repeat ancestral sin, and the sinner’s return to life.
NETS, Lamentations, “To the Reader”, p. 932, on the twenty-two-line fifth poem and its distinction from the alphabetic acrostics.
Coptic Reader, Midnight Praises for Joyous Saturday, “Praise of the Prophet Jeremiah (Lamentations 5:16-22).”
Footnotes
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NETS, Lamentations, “To the Reader”, p. 932, notes that chapter 5 is not an acrostic, though its twenty-two lines correspond to the Hebrew alphabet. ↩
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Ezekiel 18:14-23, Brenton’s English Septuagint, especially the contrast between the father’s conduct and the son’s response in verses 14-17, the statement of responsibility in verse 20, and the call to turn and live in verses 21-23. ↩
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Coptic Reader, Special > Pascha > Saturday > Praises, “Midnight Praises,” section “Praise of the Prophet Jeremiah (Lamentations 5:16-22),” Joyous Saturday, April 11, 2026. ↩