Job 19:23-27a
Love me some Job. If you’re not familiar with Job, it’s like this fantastic theological anti-fairytale. If you just read the prose sections at the beginning and end (specifically 1:1-2:10, 42:10-17), what you’d have is a too-neat story in which “Satan” makes a bet with God that, if upstanding and faithful Job has everything taken from him, he will turn on God. God takes the bet, takes away Job’s children, wealth and health, but Job still remains faithful and in return God rewards him with double what he had before. But that’s not all we have in Job – in between the prose sections are forty or so poetic chapters in which the clever author/editor/biblical jazz artist riffs on all that might have happened between Acts I and II. In its entirety, Job asks in so many words, “What if staying faithful to God doesn’t just mean assuming that suffering is always the consequence of our sin?” And so Job is a challenge to the theological conventional wisdom of its day (see, e.g., Proverbs), which basically held that the righteous prosper and the wicked are punished, therefore those who prosper must be righteous and those who suffer must have done something wrong. In Job, this conventional wisdom is represented by Job’s “friends” who come to “comfort” him - which means they try to convince him that his suffering is his fault and that he should just confess his sin to God and be done with it. Job, however, will have none of it: he insists he has done nothing to deserve his lot, and he calls God to account for it.
Which brings us to this week’s OT reading. It’s a bit of his answer to one of his friends, and essentially Job is insisting on his innocence – and that eventually he will be proven right. That’s why he says he wants his words written down, put in a book, engraved in rock: because he may not live to see his vindication. And that’s why the next verses make sense: “I know that my Redeemer lives…” This is understood to be a reference to a Torah provision (see Num. 35:19) whereby a person who was murdered was to be avenged by a designated “avenger of blood.” Is Job saying he believes God is the redeemer who will avenge him, or is God the one he holds responsible for his suffering? It’s kind of vague, but either way Job is – I think – making a powerful theological statement: that, whether in life or death, he will be vindicated before God. Which is why this text is fitting for the Sunday after All Saints.
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