IMAGE SOURCE: The featured image this week is “Job and his friends” by Ilya Repin (1844–1930 in the Russian Museum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Job_and_his_friends.jpg
Pentecost 20B
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
6 October 2024
[ video ]
This week we start a new set of readings in our Sunday services.
Alongside the passages from the Gospel of Mark, we stay with the wisdom tradition of ancient Judaism and earliest Christianity; but we shift from Proverbs and James to Job and Hebrews.
During the next 4 Sundays these are the biblical wells from which we shall be drawing as we seek spiritual wisdom for our everyday lives in a world that is vastly different from the times when these documents were composed.
From the poetry of Job, we have inherited two phrases that remain is use in our culture today, even if fewer people now understand them compared with previous times:
Patience of Job – Job is a character who seems unflappable by the disasters that befall him. In a mere 30 seconds, a simple Google search will generate 161,000,000 results when you look up this phrase.
Job’s comforters – this phrase is not so common. You will only get 24,600,000 search results for that phrase in Google. It refers, of course, to the friends who come to visit Job when they hear of the disasters that have befallen him and seek to offer him comfort. Their comfort is essentially to offer him platitudes from their religion that do not really fit with Job’s personal situation at all. Instead of offering comfort, they offer him a huge guilt trip! He must have done something to cause all this, and—in some way—he must deserve what is happening to him.
We may well aspire to the patience of Job, but we surely do not need the self-serving advice of religious friends who seem more interested in defending God than in standing with us in a time of immense grief.
In parallel with the 4 excerpts that we shall hear from Job during October, we are also going to have a set of 4 excerpts from the letter to the Hebrews.
Just as there is no other book like Job in the Old Testament, so there is no other book like Hebrews in the New Testament.
Job seems to protest the usual teaching that obedience to God will result in a life of blessing.
Job tells us in bold terms that bad things do indeed happen to good people.
We know that is true, but we do not say it out aloud very often in church.
Let me come back to Job shortly.
First, let me say a little more about Hebrews.
This unusual document wants us to think deeply about the significance of Jesus, using categories that come from Jewish tradition: including especially angels, Moses, the temple and its sacrifices, and a mysterious character, Melchizedek (who we happened to mention last Sunday).
As we heard in the excerpt read this morning, Hebrew begins with an affirmation of Jesus as the final and definitive revelation of God.
Just last week we were celebrating the feast of St Michael and All Angels, and now we are being reminded that Jesus is much more than angel. He is God among us and beyond us:
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.
In the coming weeks we shall explore a few other aspects of Hebrews:
- Jesus as our great high priest through whom we have access to the Father
- Jesus as a priest like Melchizedek, but made perfect through is sufferings
- Jesus as an eternal priest who is always there for us
This a powerful and imaginative way to think about Jesus, but it is not derived from historical reality. After all, Jesus was not from a priestly family and never functioned in any liturgical role as a priest. Rather, our writer is taking categories of priesthood and angels from the Jewish tradition and using those categories to think in fresh and imaginative ways about the significance of Jesus.
One lesson we may take from this is that we have permission to use our imagination. We are not limited to the bare facts. Truth is more than an account of what happened. Meaning should not be mortgaged to historicity.
This should not be a surprise for followers of Jesus, the master of parables and aphorisms.
The parables offer us truth, not because they happened, but because they invite us to see the world through eyes of faith.
Perhaps Hebrews is also inviting us to imagine Jesus in a fresh way, and consider how that will shape the way we live?
But back to Job!
Keep hold of the idea that we can use imagination to draw deeply from the spiritual wells offered to us by the Bible.
Here is a simple mediation task for you to practise this week.
Instead of Job’s friends coming to comfort him, I invite you to imagine Job coming to visit Jesus while he hung on the cross.
Of course, it never happened. But we can imagine it, and from that act of spiritual imagination we can gain fresh wisdom for our own lives.
This way of bringing together the wisdom of Job and the passion of Jesus was initially suggested to me by a colleague from Tonga, Jione Havea. I found it a powerful way to imagine new depths of meaning in both stories: the story of Job and the story of Jesus.
Imagine Job coming to sit and the foot of the cross, dressed in his sack cloth and ashes. What might these two men say to each other? Job sitting on his dung heap and scraping his sores with a piece of broken crockery. Jesus nailed to a tree.
Two guys who had done everything right!
Where is God for each of them?
What does salvation look like—and feel like—to each of them?
How might they encourage and comfort one another?
What if they came and sat at my dining table? What might I learn about faith, hope and life from each of them?
Am I ready for that conversation?
Are you?
Do leave a reply. I always appreciate hearing from my readers/