Friday • 9/13/2024 •

Friday of Proper 18

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 40; Psalm 54; Acts 15:12-21; John 11:30-44

Job 42 (a departure from the Book of Common Prayer)

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6-11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9-10, 13, BCP, p. 93)

As I noted on Monday, we are jumping ahead in our Old Testament readings to the last chapters of the Book of Job, today to Job 42.

Job is restored. Despite appearances, the happiest part of the happy ending of the Book of Job is not the restoration of the sufferer’s fortunes (42:10-17). I don’t mean to minimize Job’s receiving “twice as much as he had before” (42:10). However, the real climax of the story lies in Job’s words to the Lord, “But now my eyes see you” (42:5b), and in the Lord’s words to Eliphaz, “And my servant Job shall pray for you” (42:8b). 

“But now my eyes see you.” In his striving for an audience with God his “tormentor,” Job had dared to hope that after his death he might “see” God, and in him see his Advocate and Friend (19:25-27). Yahweh has done so much more than that. Yahweh has pulled back the curtain between heaven and earth, if only to show Job his own limitedness and Yahweh’s incomprehensibility. In doing so, God has permitted Job to see as much of Yahweh’s own self as a human can stand. Job has taken his place alongside Abraham, Moses, and Isaiah as those who have “seen” the invisible, eternal, and almighty God. And for Job, that is more than sufficient. As Peter Kreeft puts it: “Here God answers Job’s deepest heart quest: to see God face to face; to see Truth, not truths; to meet Truth, not just to know it” (Kreeft, Three Philosophies, p. 92). 

“And my servant Job shall pray for you.” Throughout the Book of Job, his friends have mouthed many abstract truths about God. But the only person who has spoken directly to God is Job. Even if his thoughts have been confused, he has known to Whom to go with his confusion. God’s verdict is that Job alone has spoken truthfully. His friends, by contrast, have lobbed mortars of “truths” (we might say that they have fired off “Bible bullets”)—but they have not spoken truthfully. 

So, now, the second thing that makes for a happy ending to the book is that Yahweh calls upon Job to pray for his friends. Ministry flows out of a real relationship with the Living God, not out of a lot of head knowledge about the idea of God. Here is a powerful anticipation of the Apostle Paul’s discovery that it is the consoled who can console: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). 

Jesus weeps. The Job story’s tenderness towards the friends is its own indication that there’s more to the God of Job than the high and mighty Tester of souls, spinner-outer of the stars, and manufacturer of Behemoth and Leviathan. That is what makes today’s account of Jesus at the tomb of his friend Lazarus so wonderful. God-in-flesh has tears sliding down his cheeks as he beholds the grief of Lazarus’s circle of friends and family. His heart is breaking for them, but Jesus feels something stronger as well (John 11:35). God-in-flesh shudders within himself in rage at what death does to God’s image-bearers. (Here please note that the NRSV is entirely too tame, twice offering “he was greatly disturbed in spirit” when the Greek in this passage really denotes rage! — John 11:33,38). And God-in-flesh has come to do something about it. He will take it all into himself when he is lifted up on his Cross. In advance of that, he stands with weeping friends and makes their sorrow his. He will not let them weep alone. He will cry with them. 

What we learn from John 11 is that the God who weeps at the sadness of his friends, stays alongside each of us through burials, sicknesses, bouts of depression, spiritual turmoil, broken relationships, seasons of apathy or aloneness, sorrow at global unrest (as the date September 11 has reminded us ever since that blue-sky Tuesday morning in 2001)—and he weeps with us. He sighs as you sigh, shudders as you shudder, and matches you tear for tear. As Jesus wept on the way to the tomb of his friend, people exclaimed, “See how he loved him!” So Jesus loves you now. And just as he called then, “Lazarus, come out!” so will he do for you. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+