Meditation for the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, 8:00am Morning Prayer
“I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand
at the latter day upon the earth”
They are, perhaps, familiar words, even comforting words. You may recall them from the Prayer Book Burial Office. And yet, it is always a bit disconcerting to discover certain Scriptural passages, familiar to us in the Liturgy, in their actual context such as we have heard this morning from our first lesson from The Book of Job.
We might call it Job’s complaint; a complaint voiced against the Comforters whose advice and counsel disturbs Job greatly. His cry, however, is to the God, who, it seems, does not answer and, yet, in this word, Job insists on the truth of God no matter how things appear. Indeed, the way things appear is always less than the way things truly are, at least in the sight of God. Job understands this over and against our all-too-human tendencies to reduce the mystery of God to our schemes, systems and calculations. That is the great glory of Job. He is only too well aware of the distance between God and man. His cry to God is equally a cry of frustration and criticism of the Comforters who, as he sees it, are beating up on him with far less justification than the God who seems to pursue him and who seems to have touched him with suffering.
And there is the point, almost unthinkable for us, that human suffering could be viewed as coming, in some sense, from the hand of God. Job knows what the Comforters and many of us fail to understand. The older Prayer Book tradition understood this and incorporated it into the Service of the Ministry of the Sick with the strong commendatory words to be said to someone on their death bed: “Know ye this, that this is the visitation of the Lord upon you.” Unheard of and quite unthinkable in our age. We quaver at such words or reject them with angry disdain but there is a great and strange comfort in them. What is it? Simply that our sufferings and our deaths are not apart from the love and care of God for us; that God makes a way to us through the path of suffering and death.
How is this even thinkable? Only through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Only through the passion and death of Christ which makes it possible to see human suffering, as Paul suggests in our second lesson, as participating in the sufferings of Christ for us. This is to push things beyond Job and yet in the very direction that Job points us in this passage. His cry is to God. It is a kind of affirmation of faith and in a wonderfully Jewish way. For it proclaims something about God that implies the necessity of God’s response. “I know,” Job says, and he is saying this against what the Comforters do not know because they have, as we all do, so domesticated and reduced God to our level and concerns as to render God as utterly unthinkable and certainly unbelievable.
We need the wonderful wisdom of Job in his struggle with God to open us out to the deeper meaning of our life in Christ. Job’s cry from the heart opens us out to the mystery of God’s coming to us and entering into the very flesh and fabric of human life. He does so to bring us to himself, to the fulfillment of the insight of Job for each of us, that we “shall see God,” that we shall find the truth and dignity of our humanity in God.
“I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand
at the latter day upon the earth”
Fr. Curry
Meditation, MP
Trinity XIX,
Oct. 6th, 2013
