Thursday • 8/22/2024 •

Thursday of Proper 15

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 131; Psalm 132; Psalm 133; Job 1:1-22; Acts 8:26-40; John 6:16-27

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3-4, BCP, p. 94)

Following the monastic tradition of the Western church, the Daily Office has us read Job during the months of August and September. Every era, I think, has reason to feel Job is a timely read — our day seems especially marked with loss: security, love, freedom, well-being, safety. I’m sure you can think of many ways Job fits your experience of late. A lot has been, and is being, lost.

Image: Silvestro Chiesa , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A few things to pay attention to:

Job and faith. Job is our ally when our faith gets challenged by experience. Though he is “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned from evil” (and there’s no reason to discount that language), all the props that seem to be signs of God’s blessings get stripped. Job has to face this question: Is God enough? Or has Job’s blamelessness just been too easy? We will see him flirt with disastrous ideas. We will see him rage against God. We will see him express brutal frustration with God and with His ways. But even though God will seem to shout him down at the end, actually, in the end God will commend him. God will tell Job’s friends: “You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.”

During our challenging era, I pray that all that comes against you gives you a more honest and direct line of communication with God. He can handle it.

Job and friends. Indeed, we will watch Job contending with his friends and their shallow “plug-and-play” wisdom theology that says only bad people experience bad things. And we will see that while they will have done their theology only in the third person (that is, they never pray it), Job will have the honesty to take his complaints to God. The result will be that the Lord will finally tell the friends to ask Job to pray for them: “My servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done” (Job 42:8).

During the greatest challenges that come our way, I pray that we are attentive to the ways that others around us struggle with a meaningful faith. They need us to do what Paul describes as “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). When that happens, as Paul goes on to say, “we…grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”

Meanwhile, our study of Job will reveal the battle within his own soul to hold on to the initial confession he makes when hardship first hits: “‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” The question is whether he—and by extension, you and I—will be able to hold on to that trust when things get worse and worse.

Job & Isaiah’s Suffering Servant in Acts 8. Meanwhile, entertain the prospect that as an innocent sufferer, Job prefigures in some fashion the great Innocent Sufferer that Isaiah describes in his Suffering Servant song, and which Philip explains to the Ethiopian eunuch during the chariot ride on the road to Gaza. The Bible’s unique posture on suffering is that it is never ours to bear alone. Looking ahead, Job himself senses that he has an Advocate/Redeemer who will stand with him in his sufferings, and that death itself will not break the bond between them:

For I know that my Redeemer lives,
    and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
26 and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
    then in my flesh I shall see God,
27 whom I shall see on my side,
    and my eyes shall behold, and not another (Job 19:25-27).

If only Job knew how that was going to come to pass—but we do!

Job & Jesus and Food for Eternal Life. It is a hard lesson for Job—losing wealth and family and health as he does—but there is a glorious “far side” to the recognition that, as Jesus says in today’s gospel reading, there is one “food that perishes” and another “that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” From Genesis to Revelation, this is the great message of the Bible. And as you read Job alongside John’s telling of Jesus’s life, I pray that this food indeed nourishes you with the life which is eternal.

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+