Proper 27

Preparation

    Please begin by reading Job 19:23-27 in your Bible. If you do not have one at hand, we have provided that text for you at the end of this reflection.

Reflection--My Redeemer Lives!

    There are days when things are not going well that I think will never pass.  I've had more than a few of those lately.  But then I pause and look around and it dawns on me that life as a whole is rushing by.  Here we are again in November.  In just a very few short weeks the season of Advent will begin.  It will be time to once more prepare for the celebration of the coming on the Christ child and to think what that means in each of our lives.

    Already the hearts of God’s people are moving toward the major themes of the season.  It is a season of celebration, but it is also a season of intense longing.  Maturing Christian faith brings not only the glow in the heart that comes with thoughts of the baby in the manger, but a passion for the future coming of Christ in majesty and being united at last with “the Lamb at the center of the throne” who “will guide us to springs of the water of life” and “will wipe away every tear from our eyes.”  (Revelation 7:17)

Job is a complex, challenging book that struggles with theodicy; the question of how we reconcile God's goodness and justice with the evil and undeserved suffering we experience in the world.  The author wrote well before the birth of Jesus in a context of struggle for meaning within Jewish faith, but the words of Job 19:23-27 have taken on new meaning and captured the imagination of Christians for centuries.  Whatever the writer may have originally intended, they perfectly embody Christian longing for Jesus’ return and our own resurrection and union with the Holy Lamb of God.

For Christians, the passage gives voice to the bedrock of our faith; an unshakable confidence that Jesus lives, that God’s eventual victory is assured, and that our death is a temporary passage from one realm to another where we too will see our Redeemer with our own eyes.  Despite death and physical decay on this side, we will be reunited with our God on the other. 

As our faith grows deeper, we begin to feel a yearning for that reunion.  “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again” becomes more than a dry phrase repeated on Sundays.  It becomes a confident affirmation.

    As your thoughts begin to shift toward Advent, now just three weeks away, prepare to think of it not just as a time of nostalgia for the past; even the beautiful past of events in Bethlehem on that “silent night.”  Begin to think about it in terms of a joyful and confident celebration of the future.  Know that your Redeemer lives! 

revclay

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Job 19:23-27

      

“Oh, that my words were recorded,

that they were written on a scroll,

that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead,

or engraved in rock forever!

I know that my Redeemer lives,

and that in the end will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been destroyed,

yet in my flesh I will see God;

I myself will see God with my own eyes –

I, and not another.

How my heart yearns within me!”

 [NRSV]