Year: 2013

“Have you considered my servant Job?”

In the Sunday Office of Morning Prayer, we begin to read from The Book of Job.  Job is the proverbial man of troubles. “All God’s children got troubles,” as the old gospel song puts it, but few have as many troubles as Job. Yet the point of The Book of Job is not simply the extent of his troubles. The point is more about the nature of Job’s dealing with his troubles, especially his faithfulness which takes the form of wrestling with God and for God.

The Book of Job is really a kind of play, a drama of the possibilities of salvation and grace which arise out of the awareness of our utter emptiness. Job, like Abraham, is put to the test. But unlike Abraham, with Job we get to see the inner struggle. We get to see how things look like from the inside of the man of troubles.

It is not about a whine, a whinge or a whimper. But neither is it about lying down and letting God, the world, and other people simply walk all over you. In short, it is not about our fatalistic surrender to the seemingly arbitrary and bitter pointlessness of life. If anything, The Book of Job is a resounding testimony to the justice of God which cannot be reduced to human calculation, whim and demand. For no matter how things appear God’s justice runs and moves through all things, including our hearts. As such The Book of Job is a radical affirmation of the doctrine of creation.

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“Be not anxious”

I have to admit, nothing makes me more anxious than this text! And not just because it falls this year at that time when we are getting back to our regular patterns and routines, to the beginning again of our various programmes with all of the anxieties and worries, the busyness and the annoyances, too, that attend such things. Why, then, the anxiety about not being anxious? Because it is so easily said and yet so greatly misunderstood. To be sure, we are rightly exhorted not to be anxious not just once but actually three times. To be sure, we are given powerful illustrations and reasons not to be anxious. “Behold”, “consider”, “seek” – these are the strong verbs which counter explicitly and wonderfully all our anxieties. They recall us to the great doctrine of the Providence of God. And yet, what makes me anxious, year after year, is how we fail to get this central teaching, the deep doctrine, the critical understanding, that is, in fact, the only true and real counter to the anxieties and the cares, the fears and the worries of each and every age.

That central teaching is further illustrated, I think, both in the Epistle reading and in the Gospel by way of other texts. “God forbid that I should glory,” St Paul tells us, “save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He goes on to say, that “neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.” That is the key phrase, a new creation. Something has changed; the old has become new. There is a new creation. Such is the radical meaning of human redemption. It is entirely about a new creation. We are a new creation in Christ. We forget this at our peril. And in the Gospel? Well, just ponder the weight and meaning of the final coda: “Be ye not anxious about the morrow; for the morrow shall take care for itself: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

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