Failed Labor Gives Way to Hope beyond Death

Peace is credited to God, other lords are dead, and national labor has brought forth wind

LORD, thou wilt ordain peace for us: for thou also hast wrought all our works in us. O LORD our God, other lords beside thee have had dominion over us: but by thee only will we make mention of thy name. They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise: therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish. Thou hast increased the nation, O LORD, thou hast increased the nation: thou art glorified: thou hadst removed it far unto all the ends of the earth.

LORD, in trouble have they visited thee, they poured out a prayer when thy chastening was upon them. Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain, and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been in thy sight, O LORD. We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth; neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen. Former lords perish. The people's own labor pangs produce no deliverance. The confession is communal failure, not a cue for triumphal violence against the world's inhabitants.

Dew and a waking shout open a hope the failed labor did not earn

Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.

Hidden dew and the summons to the dust-dwellers move beyond ordinary national recovery. The hope is extraordinary; it is not a date on a chart, not speculative geography, and not a claim that present headlines have already emptied the graves.