I know that my Redeemer lives!

Job 14:7-15, 19:23-27

One of the biggest worries I have in using the Narrative Lectionary is that there is an extended period of time between Easter and Advent—well over half the year—when I am not preaching from the Gospels. Now, I’m not one who believes you have to have a Gospel reading—obviously we don’t—and I do think there is a LOT for us to learn from the Old Testament, but there is a problem with reading from the Hebrew Bible and this is that the good news in the Old Testament gets kind of tempered by our own Jesus-expectations. Since we know we end up with Jesus the temptation is to find little value in the prelude to him. Who cares about the expectations that the Hebrew people had of the coming Messiah when we already know who he ended up being?

However, there are occasions where these Old Testament folks seem to get it—much better than ourselves, in fact. There are times when they are actually some of the best examples of faith without sight that we have. Again Job is one great example. Job has everything ripped away from him—his stuff, his work, his land, his family; all of it is taken from him. But, more than that, Job, like all the people in the Old Testament, also lacks a promise of eternal life. Now, I’m not saying that he’s not going to be saved ex post facto because of Jesus or anything like that; just that, even like some people in our world today, he has never heard of that promise, because, in this time in history, nobody knew of that promise.

I mean, the descendants of Abraham had promises of land and descendants and a great nation. Those were the covenants God made with them. And all of those are wonderful promises for a nation, but individually there are people like Job who experience few of the rewards of those promises. His land is gone; his family is dead; his nation might be the greatest in the world, but even if it were that great is that enough to comfort him? Doubtful.

            Job has nowhere to turn. So he turns to God, and in his desperate longing we hear echoes of a deeper promise that he could not have known but is one so familiar to our ears. Listen closely: 

As waters fail from a lake,
   and a river wastes away and dries up,
¹² so mortals lie down and do not rise again;
   until the heavens are no more, they will not awake
   or be roused out of their sleep.
¹³ O that you would hide me in Sheol,
   that you would conceal me until your wrath is past,
   that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me!
¹⁴ If mortals die, will they live again?

            Job has landed on the great existential question of human beings in every time and place. “If mortals die, will they live again?” But he ends up asking the question with wonderful hints of what he hopes for. “As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so mortals lie down and do not rise again.” Of all the images Job could have chosen this is an odd one, because every lake is capable of being refilled. Water, of all things, is cyclical and seasonal; it is life-giving and life-stealing. The implied answer to all of these questions is “no!” No, if we die we don’t live again; no, if a lake is drained it is gone. And, yet, if you listen close you might hear hints of Job’s famous words from the first chapter. “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!” Might that giving and taking away be a sign of something greater?

            Job continues, “O that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would conceal me until your wrath is past, that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me!” Sheol, for those who are unfamiliar, is the Hebrew concept of the land of the dead. It is the Jewish after-life; it is not heaven or hell; it’s simply where the dead live. So it’s a little funny that Job delves into the land of the dead to ask for God to remember him. For the first time we see hints that he desires for something beyond this life. He is realizing that this life with all of its temporary promises just isn’t enough. He’s landing on the only logical place for a person who has spent time in this world. There is nothing good enough to justify the suffering of losing something that can’t be regained. Oh, you can try to justify it. You can try to suggest that everything happens for a reason and that things will turn out for the good; you can try to explain the calculus of blessings and curses, but, at the end of the day, certain things lie beyond justification. You can’t tell somebody who has been raped, or had their family murdered, or been enslaved, or experienced the genocide of their people, that their pain served some greater purpose. In fact, the fact that their suffering can’t be made completely right is precisely why we are so desperately in need of a Savior, like Jesus, who isn’t just about giving us land and descendants and a great name. We need more than that.

            Job guesses at all of this. You can see it underneath what he is saying. Flash-forward to chapter 19 where Job says,

‘O that my words were written down!
   O that they were inscribed in a book!
²⁴ O that with an iron pen and with lead
   they were engraved on a rock for ever!
²⁵ For I know that my Redeemer lives,
   and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
²⁶ and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
   then in my flesh I shall see God.

            Ironically or not, Job gets his wish that his words are inscribed in a book. More than that, his questions live on in the questions all of us have. But what’s truly astounding is the transition Job makes from mourning to that familiar turn of phrase, “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.” It is precisely when all is lost that Job comes to this startling and stunning confession. When tested, Job does not rely on the gifts he has been given as evidence of God’s glory—he has none left—and yet, still, he is capable of getting the heart of the matter. This is a confession par excellence. I know that my Redeemer lives—in spite of my family being ripped from me, in spite of marauding barbarians taking my land, in spite of the greatness of my name being diminished over all the earth—in spite of all of it I know that my Redeemer lives!

            What’s more astounding still is that the thing that Job yearns for—the heaven that we so easily default to—is nowhere to be seen. It is enough to be in the presence of God and to see him. That’s all Job feels he needs. How selfish are we that we imagine a paradise, a world where everything feels great and we are reunited with those we love! Job doesn’t imagine even that! His vision is simply seeing God standing upon the earth—all he needs is life after death—and that’s why Job is a better person than the rest of us. He gets it. He really does. His seemingly modest expectations are truly all that we need. He doesn’t know how this could come to pass—how could he? So, instead, he imagines the best possible thing he could: seeing God. That’s it. If he could see God it would all be worth it.

            Ironically, some hundreds of years later some people would have that opportunity. God came down in the flesh… and… they… murdered him. Maybe you have seen that comic strip of the aliens coming down to earth and meeting the Christians, and the Christians, in their hurry to be good evangelists, ask if the aliens have met Jesus as well, and the alien says, “Oh, he comes back every two weeks or so, we gave him this big box of chocolates when he first arrived. Why? What’d you guys do?”

            We kill nice things. Jesus is the living proof. This is also why Job is so astounding. You get the sense that if anybody might not have killed Jesus it was Job; he might truly have been the best of all of us. But here’s the thing: Job still has a reality-check coming down the chute. Job’s one big flaw, the one thing that keeps him from truly seeing God, is that his vision of the justification for all this evil and loss is still self-centered. It is still about him. “I know that my redeemer lives!” “Then in my flesh I shall see God.” The one thing that Job has left—the only thing really—is himself. And over the next three weeks, as we read through the rest of Job, we’ll see what happens when he is confronted with that person in the mirror—great though he may appear.

            But, for today, we are left with just a glimpse at something better. Job was on the right track; he was writing the first words of the hymn we are about to sing, even before he could know who his Redeemer could possibly be. “I know that my Redeemer lives!” That’s the confession of a person who knows his need, his utter dependence on something, who has experienced loss and despair, who is in need of redemption. May we have an ounce of the faith it took for him to get there. Better still, as people who have the assurance of life in Christ may we meet our suffering the way Job meets his. Not cheaply but hard fought with grace mourning and grieving before, at the end of the day, confessing that there is nobody else to who we can turn. May we confess that we are little creatures, Job-like in our uncertainty. Such is life. God takes us as we are, and does something with us truly extraordinary.