November 10, 2019 “In My Body” – Job 19:23-27a

Job 19:23-27a
“In My Body”
November 10, 2019 – Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

The last words Socrates said before his death were, “Crito, we ought to offer a rooster to Asclepius. See to it and don’t forget.” I first learned in a translator’s footnote that Asclepius was the Greek god of healing. To ask for a sacrifice to Asclepius was Socrates’ ironic way of saying that his death was going to be a cure, a cure for life.

That outlook on human life and death had been the point of Plato’s whole dialogue, The Phaedo, up to the point when the condemned-to-death Socrates accepted a cup of hemlock, poison, and drank it. Before his body grew stiff and cold, Socrates did his best to philosophically persuade his companions that life goes on beyond death, that the human soul is immortal. Those with the proper philosophical and moral preparation leave their bodies behind and go on to live forever in indescribably beautiful habitations beyond the physical world.

When I first read those last thoughts and words of Socrates, I was deeply moved, thinking how much they resonated with our Christian hope to live forever in heaven with our Lord. Socrates’ death by an unjust trial and execution also strikes chords with what the Bible tells us about Jesus. But I’ve since realized that, despite the resonance, Plato’s ideas about the soul and death are very unlike our Christian faith in many ways.

As we heard today from Job and also Jesus Himself in Luke’s Gospel, the Christian hope for life after death is not about leaving our bodies behind for some sort of eternal, spiritual, non-physical existence. When Job said that he expected to see God, he expected to do so in his body, with his eyes. While Christians may share Socrates’ belief in an immortal soul, our faith, our hope, is in the resurrection of the body.

For the past couple of weeks we have been reading Job’s story of physical and material suffering. We heard how God first allowed Satan to take away all his possessions, including his children, but insisted that his person, his body, remain untouched. Further taunts by Satan resulted in permission to inflict physical suffering and pain on Job himself, sores from head to toe. In chapter 3, Job wished he had never have been born. You might think he too would like the idea of death as a cure for life.

Yet death as an escape from life is just exactly what Job refused. He wished he had never been born, but Job’s wife suggested he commit a kind of spiritual suicide, death by God, kind of like what they now call “death by cop.” She told him, “Curse God and die,” thinking God would strike down anyone who curses Him. But Job called her foolish. He said, “Should we accept only good things from the hand of God, but never anything bad?”

As all those long speeches in Job unfold, it becomes clear that there is one large theme to most of what Job has to say. He is innocent and he wants justice. He wants justice from God. As Christians, we might be inclined to question Job’s premise. “No one is innocent,” we think. We may have memorized Romans 3:23 as part of the “Roman Road” to salvation, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So we might find Job just a little arrogant in his insistence that he has done nothing wrong.

The trouble is, that “everyone has sinned” point of view is just how Job’s friends saw it and kept telling him. He must not be innocent after all. He must have sinned somewhere, somehow. He just needs to admit it, repent, and then God will help him. But in order to understand Job, in order to understand this whole book, we need to take what he says at face value, to accept his starting point. He has done nothing wrong. What has happened to him is simply not fair. It’s bad karma when he had earned good karma. The cosmic scales of justice have tilted the wrong way for Job.

To get inside the story of Job we have to set aside, at least for a while, our usual theology of sin and grace, our Christian way of looking at it, which tells us no one really deserves God’s favor and that salvation is an unmerited gift. Instead, we need to go and sit with Job in the ashes and remember that there really is undeserved and horrible suffering in this world and maybe in our own lives.

Job’s innocence helps us remember the innocence of children who are abused in horrendous ways or aborted from life before they are even born. Job’s innocence should force us to recall the relative innocence of those who suffer across the world just because of the color their skin or the language they speak. They may be sinners in our Christian sense of guilt before God, but they have done nothing bad enough to deserve hatred, prejudice, and even genocide in return for their sins.

Like Job, most people in California did nothing that made them deserve having their homes burned to the ground in a wildfire. Half a million people in Bangladesh, like Job, did not deserve to a have the great wind of a cyclone barreling down on them last night, knocking over their houses and forcing them to flee for their lives. Like Job, those Mormons in Mexico were not sinful enough to merit a bloody massacre of their whole family.

You may have your own undeserved tragedy or more than one. You did not deserve to be abused as a child. You did nothing to warrant the loss of a parent when you were young. You don’t have a chronic illness or constant pain because of your sins. You may have lost your job or your business not at all by any fault of your own. Yet there it is. Suffering, pain, even death, and it cries out for justice. That’s what Job wanted too.

Despite all his complaints, Job remained sure that God is just. But he does not have any way to deal with that. He acknowledges in chapter 9, on page 280 in Poets, that there is no court where he can meet God and state his case. But he wishes for a mediator, “someone who could bring us together,” Job and God. In chapter 13, page 285 in Poets, he asks God to bring him face to face, to hear what he has to say, and then give him an answer.

Ultimately, we know, because we’ve read or heard the end of the story, God does show up and speak to Job. But God’s answer is not exactly what Job expected, nor what we might have expected. There’s no mention of Satan’s role in it all, no explanation of how what has happened is just or right. When God answers Job out of the whirlwind in chapter 38, page 319, instead of answering Job’s questions, He asks Job questions. God questions Job about whether he actually has knowledge or power to match God’s in any sort of discussion about anything. And Job’s humiliated reply in chapter 40, page 323, is “I am nothing—how could I ever find the answers? I will cover my mouth with my hand.”

Embarrassed and silenced Job shows us where we end up when we press the whole business of God’s justice in our lives too hard. At some point, maybe sooner than later, we just need to be quiet. Let’s be more afraid of embarrassing ourselves before God and before others when we try to give answers to big questions about human suffering.

It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn as a pastor. People ask me why a baby died, or what God has to teach them through a tragedy or a job loss. I may offer a Scripture like II Corinthians 1:4 about God comforting us in our troubles so that we can learn to comfort others with the same comfort He has given us. But, in the end, I often just need to say, “I don’t know. I hope God will explain it to us someday.”

I suggest that is the sort of pastoral answer we get from Job, not a satisfying explanation of the terrible things which happen to us, but a deeper understanding of our ignorance and a hope for more than that to come. And that is why this text we read from Job this morning is so loved and so important.

There on page 293, Job still feels like what he has to say to God is worth saying, like he has a solid case for justice. So in verses 23 and 24 in a traditional text, he wishes that it would be literally solidified. He wants his words carved on a monument, “engraved in the rock,” and then filled in with melted lead to highlight them. They would stand there forever, like the ancient Roman inscriptions my daughter studies, proclaiming, “Here is what Job had to say to God.”

As Bryan pointed out Friday morning, Job got his wish. They may not have been chiseled in rock, but Job’s words have lasted for millennia. We are reading them now, preserved as he wished. What comes next, what we typically call verses 25 to 27 of chapter 19, even go beyond Scripture. They have become part of hymns like the one we sang a few minutes ago, have been set to music in a gorgeous aria by Handel in what is often called the “Easter” part of his “Messiah.” Those words endure in a special way, as a sign for Christians that what Jesus said about our hope of resurrection in this morning’s Gospel was glimpsed long before by Job.

With these verses, Job stops his questions and complaints for a moment and simply states what he believes, what he has confidence about:

But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives,
and he will stand upon the earth at last.
And after my body has decayed,
yet in my body I will see God!
I will see him for myself.
Yes, I will see him with my own eyes.

Earlier I asked us to set aside our Christian perspective on sin and grace in order to understand the depth of what Job is saying. But here is a place where it is perfectly all right to read the text with Christian eyes, as generations of believers like Handel have done, down through the centuries.

I will admit, though, that this is a terribly complicated text in ancient Hebrew. That word “redeemer,” ga’al in Hebrew, often means a merely human person, someone like a kinsman who can buy a family member out of slavery or avenge a death. But there are also many places, like Psalm 19:14, where God is clearly the Redeemer being named.

The lines about “after my body has been decayed, yet in my body I will see God,” are even more difficult in Hebrew. First, as the New Living Translation gets right, there are no “worms” in sight. That’s an addition from the King James which shows up in Handel’s aria, “Though worms destroy this body.” It’s understandable. Decay of a human body usually involves “worms,” maggots. But it’s not in the text.

More importantly, there is a question about that phrase “in my body.” Literally, it’s “from my body.” Some scholars think it could mean, “out of my body.” So they think Job is like Socrates, imagining some bodiless, totally spiritual, non-physical afterlife in which he is going to get to see God. I confess that I don’t know near enough Hebrew to make any scholarly judgment about that point. But I do know that “in my body” is much more consistent with the whole biblical picture of what it means to be a human being. As Jesus affirmed to the Sadducees in Luke 20, the hope of God’s people is not to float around as bodiless ghosts, but to be raised up again, in our bodies.

And of course, Job said that he expected to see God for himself, to see God with his own eyes. Literally there, he said, “with my eyes and not another.” His hope is not that someone else will see God with their eyes, but that with his own eyes he will see God. We could discuss whether it means Job expected to see God before he died (he did after all), but following that bit about his body decaying, it seems like a genuine hope for what we as Christians call resurrection.

I’d like to offer you that same hope today. We often talk about these things around Easter, but Christians meet on Sundays just because this is the day which reminds us that resurrection is always our hope. Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday and we celebrate that every week while often reciting in the Apostles’ or Nicene creed that we believe and hope in our own resurrection from the dead.

The hope and promise that I will see God “in my body” is beautiful and important for all sorts of reasons. Not least is that it helps us grasp just how wrong Socrates was about death and the afterlife. For Christians, the body is not some horrible prison from which we hope to escape someday. It is the blessed temple of the Holy Spirit in which we live and praise God now and in which we will live and praise God for eternity.

There is a blatantly false meme that pops up now and then on Facebook and other places supposedly quoting C. S. Lewis as saying, “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” That statement is both false in what it says and false as a quotation from Lewis. He never said it. True Christian theology has always understood that human beings are both soul and body. One is not complete without the other. So while we might hope for our souls to rest with God for a while, our ultimate hope is to be raised body and soul together when Christ comes again as Paul assured us He will in our reading from II Thessalonians.

Which all means that your body is a gift from God. You may think it is not what you want it to be. It’s too young or too old, too thin or too fat, too weak or too ugly. You may think that your body is what gets you into trouble, causing you to want excess food, or drink, or drugs, or sex. You might wish your ears heard better or your eyes saw more clearly. And as we know, some people wonder if the body they have is the right gender for them. Yet from the beginning in Genesis, God tells us our bodies are His gift to us, a temple for His Spirit, and a vessel meant to be filled with praise and honor toward Him.

We can get into all kinds of confusion about this business of bodies and resurrection. Those Sadducees came to Jesus in Luke 20, figuring on catching Him out with a tricky question about how it will all work out, how justice will done in that resurrection time, if seven different men have all been married to the same woman. But sort of like God answering Job’s worries about justice, Jesus told them to set aside their legal questions about marriage and remember who God is, the God of their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is the God of the living, not of the dead.

When this world overwhelms you like it overwhelmed Job, whether it is your own personal pain and suffering or the awful news of human agony around the world that flows to us every day now, I invite you to recall Job’s faith in the God who is the God of the living. He has come to us as a Redeemer who did stand on this earth, who suffered just like we do, who died just like we do. But God raised Jesus from the dead, and in Him God, through Job and Paul many other voices in Scripture, has promised to raise us too.

That’s the hope you can have when there are no answers for whatever is happening to you or around you. One day, in your body, you will see God, see the Answer Himself with your own eyes. I ask you to trust Him like Job trusted Him. Trust in Jesus Christ the Redeemer. You will, I promise, see Him with your own eyes.

Amen.