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| Job's Evil Dreams - William Blake (1805 |
This aim of the ‘Continuous’ track on the Revised Common Lectionary readings is to
take us through a significant portion of the Old Testament over a few Sundays.
Accordingly, this is the first of four devoted to the Book of Job, usually classified as part of the Bible’s ‘wisdom
literature’. It is one of the most ancient treatments of a recurring question –
why does God let terrible things happen to good people – and yet almost as
perplexing as the question it deals with. So four short extracts are not really
enough to enable us understand it, and this is one of those occasions when the Lectionary hopes to encourage us to read
the whole book for ourselves over the course of the month.
Towards the end, God finally answers Job ‘out of the
whirlwind’. What emerges is an unapologetic assertion of the inscrutability of His
purposes, and a refusal to answer to human judgment. The seeming harshness of
this is offset, though, by one of the most beautiful passages in the whole
Bible – Job 28 – which leaves us
pondering deeply on the mysterious gap between humanity and divinity.
The topic of marriage and family life links the alternative ‘Thematic’
Old Testament reading with both the Epistle
and the Gospel. A well known passage
from Genesis, in which Eve is given
to Adam because ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’, is matched with the Gospel passage in which Jesus both speaks
against divorce, and stresses how much we have to learn from children. The Epistle tells us that God ‘did not
subject the coming world . . . to angels’ but to ‘mortals’. Accordingly, it is
human relationships -- parent, child,
brother, sister – that provide us with the best concepts in which to think
about our relationship to God.
At the center of these family relationships lies marriage – and
with it, divorce. The church has been grappling intensively with marriage and
divorce over the last few decades. Is consensual ‘no fault’ divorce
permissible? Is true marriage only possible between man and woman? These are
not only difficult questions; they are also divisive. But they are not going
away, and so, somehow, Christians must struggle to resolve them. This week’s
readings point to the context that makes that struggle so significant and
compelling. The Psalm marvels that out
of the whole creation God is especially mindful of human beings, setting them ‘little
lower than the angels’. The Epistle
repeats the Psalmist’s words and underlines their astonishing nature. Part of
the marvel lies in this: God has made the human relationships into which we are
born central to our deepest insights into His Divine life – itself a communion
of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That makes them key to our hope of participating
in it.
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