The Goodness of Sadness

“The American church avoids lament. The power of lament is minimized and the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost. But absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget. The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American church results in a loss of memory. We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We forget the reality of suffering and pain.”

- Soong-Chan Rah, Prophetic Lament p22

American Christians have long avoided lament and it’s emotional corollary, sadness, in favor of triumphalism and narratives of success. But paradoxically, there is great hope and beauty in a Christian embrace of sadness and lament.

What is Lament?

One way to understand lament is to call it an open expression of sadness and complaint before God in prayer. Lament is not just complaint and sadness: its prayer, it is an expression of negative emotion that is especially before God. Its easy to complain to one another, but going to God with our complaint involves a very big step of faith, and it is a very clear expression of believing that the gospel is real. In a broad sense, complaining to anyone is a kind of lament, but that’s not really a Christian definition. Lament as we see it in the Bible is vertical, not horizontal.

Lament before God in prayer can include elements other than complaint, but without some kind of complaint, the lament feels incomplete. With complaint, with an emotional ‘How long?’ or ‘Why?’ the speaker is vulnerable before God. This is why the phrase ‘open expression’ is important: lament is emotional and spiritual vulnerability. Perhaps lament should be called ‘vulnerable prayer.’

It’s important to distinguish lament from simply speaking about suffering. There are many worship songs with descriptions of suffering and hard situations that sound like lament but are not truly lament. For instance, the song, O Lord My Rock and My Redeemer, has some beautiful and compelling statements about suffering:

My sword to fight the cruel deceiver
And my shield against his hateful darts
My song when enemies surround me
My hope when tides of sorrow rise
My joy when trials are abounding
Your faithfulness, my refuge in the night

Nathan Stiff, Sovereign Grace Music 2018

These are wonderful truths, but they are not statements of lament. They are statements of praise that don’t require any vulnerability. An example of lament would be this verse from the song, O Thou in Whose Presence:

Say, why in the valley of death should I weep,
Or alone in this wilderness rove?
Oh, why should I wander, an alien from Thee,
Or cry in the desert for bread?
Thy foes will rejoice when my sorrows they see,
And smile at the tears I have shed

Joseph Swain 1791

So How is Sadness Good?

Sadness is good when it is an accurate reflection of sad circumstances: our emotions should accurately reflect various situations in our lives; we should be happy in happy situations, angry in situations of injustice, frightened in dangerous situations. When we don’t allow our emotions to accurately reflect circumstances, dissonance and disconnect occur between our soul and reality.

Sadness is also good because it is an essential element in healing from grief. When bad things happen, there are many destructive temptations that the sufferer may feel, but when that person begins to express sadness about it, that sadness is a sign of turning in the right direction, particularly in a less destructive direction. Healing involves far more than sadness of course, but healing never happens without sadness. Sadness — or especially the acceptance of sadness, and bringing sadness to God in lament — demands that we believe that there is a good God ruling the world because if God doesn’t exist, or he isn’t good, then we should be stoic and shrug our shoulders in the face of suffering.

Sadness is most clearly good as expressed by Jesus. His prayers were characterized by ‘loud cries and tears’ (Heb. 5:7) and this should color how we read many of his words in the gospels. During his life he had times of joy, but sadness was clearly a significant part of his life as well, and of course, he was in great anguish over the Cross. He knew the promises of his Father better than anyone, but those promises never diminished his sadness about sad things in the world. They simply meant that he had both joy and sorrow. He was never stoic, he never complained that people were too sensitive about sad things. If we are to follow in his footsteps we should be sad about sad things in the world, especially about the Cross. The cross is the demonstration of true love, yes, but also of great pain and we are to hold onto both, not just ‘true love instead of pain.’

When is Sadness Bad?

Sadness is unhealthy whenever its detached from, and unrelated to a person’s actual circumstances, although in that sense it is detachment that is the problem more than sadness itself. I can’t recall ever speaking with anyone that I know personally who was sad and had no reason whatsoever for their sadness. A detachment between sadness and circumstances can happen with depression, but even then, there was usually a very legitimate reason for the sadness.

It’s also true that sadness is not good if it never translates into lament. Sadness that never gets brought to God over a lengthy period of time could well be due to faithlessness, or a lack of belief in the gospel. Of course, a lot of people falsely believe that they should only have joy in the midst of suffering or should at least be quiet about their grief and never complain. In the end, they are failing to address their grief honestly, which is a sadness that is detached from circumstances.

So it is concerning if someone’s sadness is disproportionate to their circumstances, but I’m more concerned about the tendency of American Christians to try to find a reason to avoid empathy (which manifests in victim-blaming: ‘You just have to get over it’, ‘Everybody is so sensitive these days’), than I am about someone who is too sad in proportion to sad events.

Ultimately hope and sadness can and should coexist. When sadness is on its own, it usually becomes despair which is bad. And when hope is on its own, it usually becomes naive. But when hope accompanies sadness, it doesn’t eliminate the sadness: hope and sadness can walk together like two feet. Christians need both as a consistent, practical outworking of the eschatological reality of the ‘already/not yet.’

It’s easy to forget that hope and sadness can coexist; it’s easy to think that when someone hears something hopeful, that the right response is to stop being sad and only be happy. But this is what we might call an ‘over-realized emotional eschatology.’ When someone has an over-realized eschatology, they usually believe that positive social change can be completely realized in this life, because Jesus has already come and lived and died and rose again. An over-realized emotional eschatology acts like this but is emotional rather than sociological. Such a person acts like Christians should only ever have positive emotions as if we live in the new heavens and the new earth already.

The New Testament gives great clarity to our hope, but this makes doesn’t make us any more hopeful or any less lamentful than an Old Testament saint would be. The psalms of lament don’t change with the New Testament, other than the fact that we see Jesus in those psalms. The most hopeless psalm, Psalm 88, is a horrifying yet beautiful depiction of what Jesus experienced, most clearly on the cross but also in his life. And importantly, Christ’s fulfillment of the psalms doesn’t mean that we will never experience the pain that is in them, including Psalm 88. It just means that we have greater clarity about the Incarnation and God’s presence with us in pain. It’s common to hear people say that Jesus experienced loneliness, or some other kind of pain so that we won’t have to. But that’s not really how it works: Jesus experienced the cross so that in glory we would have no pain, but if we follow in his footsteps here and now, we will have pain.

What About the Commands to Rejoice in Suffering?

Hope — or joy or any other positive emotion — doesn’t cancel out sadness and lament, it walks along with it, just as the ‘not yet’ must always go right along with the ‘already,’ no matter how paradoxical they are. We can see this in the book of James, where he describes Job as an example of steadfastness even though Job appears to be anything but steadfast. Job is ‘Exhibit A’ of emotional roller coasters, but if he was also steadfast as James tells us (Jas. 5:11), then we should see lament and steadfastness as going together, and perhaps even understand that lament aids steadfastness. So in James 1:2, where he tells us to count it all joy when we experience all kinds of trials because they produce steadfastness, that command does not eliminate lament, it just gives a different color to it, or perhaps a long-term perspective to it. Given his Jewish background and thus his knowledge of the Psalms, James may be assuming that his audience already accepts lament as part of the process of growing in steadfastness and character.

The joy that James is talking about may well be characterized by John Piper’s phrase, ‘faith in future grace.’ James doesn’t say that we need to feel joy, he says that we need to count it as joy. Counting our trials as joy is an act of faith, not an exchanging of emotions. Joy in this sense is akin to a retirement account that we look forward to benefiting from in the future where we will see the future fruit of steadfastness that will come to us in due time. It is certainly not a masochistic enjoyment of pain, nor a blind, stoic ignorance of suffering.

An often missed part of the story of Paul’s thorn in the flesh in 2 Cor. 12 is verse 8 where Paul says he pleaded with God to take away the thorn. We don’t know exactly what Paul’s pleas looked like, but it is hard to imagine his pleas as taking the form of anything other than lament. It is quite possible that he utilized one or more of the many psalms of lament that he would have been familiar with.

I very much doubt that Paul and James (and other writers of New Testament letters) envisioned a Christianity without lament, certainly never a Christianity that encourages so much stoicism and naive positivity as the American Church does. It may be analogous to how the New Testament does not contain numerous commands to meet together in a local church because such a commitment was widely assumed.

Isn’t Complaining a Sin?

Complaining to God is rarely done without sin, but taking the complaint to God in the first place is far better and more godly than keeping it to oneself or only complaining to friends. Complaining to God makes American Christians more uncomfortable than complaining among friends, and that kind of discomfort is not informed by the gospel. The gospel means that we can come before God in prayer with openness about how we feel, without fear of judgment. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address sin when its in our hearts. It does mean that open and free lament before God is the way to address sin: drawing near to God before we know the right words is the best way to address sin, even if we’re kicking and screaming and saying all kinds of unhelpful things like Psalm 109.

A helpful analogy could be that when one of my kids is upset, maybe even kicking and screaming, I typically know what the reason is, and I’d rather — much rather — that they come to me and complain (and even kick and scream if that’s how they really feel) rather than not come at all or act like they didn’t care or kick and scream on their own away from me. Because of the gospel, God has the same heart toward us.

Conclusion

Embracing lament and sadness as healthy and good is not an option for Christians in a world of loss and grief. Lament is an opportunity to apply the gospel deeply, it’s an opportunity to know how much God wants to hear us speak with him, it’s an opportunity to taste and see the fatherhood of God. Lament and sadness are good, they are gifts, and we can thank God for them.