Open-ended,
Life-centred,
Gospel-Focused Explorations of Hebrew Bible Readings from the
Australian Prayer Book.
Job 19:23-27a....24th S after Pentecost,
C....
(For
LK20:27-40, scroll.)
NOTES: 1]Read the Hebrew Bible in the light
of our Christian understanding of God revealed in Jesus.2] Part of the 'Wisdom Writings',
Job probably dates from the early 5th C.BC. A gem among Hebrew writing,
it is poetry preceded by & ended by short prose passages. 3] To try to understand Job, read as
much of it as you can, not just this
short passage. 4] The format
is a kind of debate between Job (an unknown) & three of his
'friends' who give him a hard time. A fifth person joins in, then
YAHWEH. 5] The subject is the
age old question of bad things happening to good people, & connects
with the question of resurrection posed in LK20. The idea of an after
life was not at all universal in Israel, in Job's time or Jesus'. Here
Job makes one of the all time great
confessions of faith.
WARMING UP: Do we read much
poetry, or stick to prose?
TREASURES OLD & NEW:
Identify God at work in anything this week?
ENTERING INTO THE STORY:
23-24 Do we ever feel as desperate to have what we feel,
think, stand for, etc. set down for posterity as Job seems to be here?
Why doesn't anyone understand me?
If we could write our own epitaph, what would we feel vital to have
in it? What about our own eulogy? Do we ever feel someone's death
notice isn't adequate, or the eulogy at their funeral either
short-changes them or is 'over the top'? If we could choose something
from
each / any of the stages of our life to be preserved, what would it /
they be? Would our relationship with God come into it somewhere?
Quite naturally, or because we think it ought to be
made to fit somewhere? Have we ever walked in a cemetery
& been touched by an inscription on someone's grave - about them,
how someone else felt about them, or they thought about someone? Does
God get much of a mention in inscriptions from more recent times?
25-27a Could there be a
more 'Christian' understanding of Resurrection than this Hebrew one
from so long before Christ? If we can't say as much as Job does here,
can we have any real hope of resurrection for ourself or anyone else?
[cf Paul in1COR15] What connections can we see between our Redeemer
standing at the last on earth, judgment, our own resurrection, the
resurrection of a people or the world? Are we as confident as Job of
seeing God in our own flesh?
Might this mean we, in our own
resurrected body, will see our Redeemer? Or, still alive in our
earthly flesh, we expect to see our Redeemer standing at the last on
earth? . Both? Or some other interpretation still?
How can we check the validity of possible interpretations of such an
imaginative, poetic passage? Does what Job offers us here have to be
literally true as well as poetically true? If we lean too much towards
the poetically true end of the scale, might that mean we'll only be
'poetically' resurrected, too? Is this where our faith, (which is 'the
creative use of our imagination' according to Fr. Matthew Fox) needs to
kick in to help us see a truth available only to those who have 'eyes
to see & ears to hear'? How well are we seeing / hearing it?
