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Sunday
Today’s Old Testament reading needs surrounding context to fully appreciate it. Job is in the midst of his travails—everything has been stripped from him—and is wondering where God is. Why bad things happen to good people is about as basic as existential questions get. His friend Bildad is singularly unhelpful in this inquiry, having just told him that he must have brought his suffering upon himself, which Job knows is not the case. “I call aloud, but there is no justice,” he cries out.
In the midst of his complaining, however, comes a declaration of faith that provides us with today’s reading (Job 19:23-27a):
Job said,
“O that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book!
O that with an iron pen and with lead
they were engraved on a rock forever!
For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.”
Even as he says these words, Job’s skin has already been destroyed since Satan, with God’s permission, has afflicted him “with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” “I am repulsive to my wife, loathsome to the sons of my own mother,” he laments.” But in spite of his suffering, Job asserts that God will redeem him in the end. How can one have doubts about God and assert faith in God at the same time?
Anne Lamott has a wonderful answer in her collection of essays Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. Faith, she says, takes one much further than definitive answers:
The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.
The light returns for Job when God, in His/Her magnificent final speech, points out that Job has been thinking too small. Whatever happens to us as individuals—and yes, I can testify personally that when tragedy strikes we think of nothing else—we are part of a drama that is bigger than anything we can imagine. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God rhetorically asks before launching into a description of the wonders of creation.
Kahlil Gibran’s poem “On Death” captures some of this same wonder. Gibran gets at the meaning of Job asserting that he shall behold God and Jesus promising life eternal. It’s not that transcending death involves coming back in our old identities. It’s that we enter into a new relationship with creation. “[Only] when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance,” Gibran tells us.
Then Almitra spoke, saying, We would ask now of Death.
And he said:
You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honor.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Our job is to love life as deeply as we can when we have it. Because life will at times bruise us, doubts will inevitably arise.
Embrace those doubts. And then embrace whatever comes next.
