“Such vacillations of mind and emotion”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Saturday, April 8, 2023
Job 14:1-14 - (Forward, p. 69) CEV p. 534
Well can I identify with the words of Job in chapter 14 of the book given his name, especially when I look at the entire chapter rather than just the fourteen verses selected for today’s lectionary reading. Job’s thoughts and feelings are all over the place, vacillating wildly from despair to hope to despair again, and all, it would seem, within a short stretch of time. I have to admit that sometimes I am like that!
He begins by mentioning how short, troubled and sorrowful human life is. We are born weak and helpless. He develops that theme by mentioning two images:
-firstly, of the flowers of the field, which, as Jesus mentioned, spring up, almost overnight, and then fade away to nothing. (It would seem as if the transitory nature of flowers had almost become something of a cultural staple, something of a proverb, for what is so short-lived and so unsubstantial.)
-and secondly, of shadows that vanish with the rise of the sun in the morning, and even when they persist waver and change.
Job expands on this initial sense of peril and hopelessness by suggesting that God is picking on him and has put him on trial, judging him and punishing him. Here Job protests that no human, no moral, can ever live up to God’s standards, that no human can ever be clean or pure morally.
Furthermore, he declares, seeing as God has supposedly already fixed the number of his days, why doesn’t God just let him alone to live them in peace?
Here, for just a moment, Job picks up on an alternative image, that of a tree stump. When a tree is cut down, there is always the hope that it will sprout again, that when water touches it, the trunk will sprout fresh twigs once again. (And, indeed, we see this all the time with the ‘nurse logs’ of old growth forests, or with caraganas or cotoneasters when we cut them down!). What a promise, a prospect, of hope and renewal and new life.
But, alas, Job says, we humans are not like that, not at all. We are like streams and lakes and water courses, when their waters disappear all life disappear with them. (How well Job would have been aware of this, having lived in a desert climate as he did.). We did, and that is it. No more prospects, none at all!
But then, in verse 14 and following, Job’s thinking and feelings vacillate once more. ‘Wait’, he says, ‘let’s see what God does.’ Maybe God will take the initiative and call him, maybe God will take care of him and forget, overlook, all his sins and toss them all away.
Even so, Job’s hopefulness does not last and his melancholy sets in again. ‘No,’ he decides, ‘we are like the mountains that are being continually worn away by erosion and crumble to nothing.’ Likewise, God destroys and frustrates our hopes and dreams. We never even ‘get’ to see how our children ‘turn out.’
Poor Job is really rather depressed and downcast, a man full of misery and sorrow over his present fate. But, as we all know—we who have read ‘the rest of the story’— that is not the end of things. Whether Job feels like it or not just now, God is indeed there and indeed there for him—and will come through for him in the end.
In a sense, how Job felt is exactly how the disciples felt on that Easter Saturday. All hope and all prospects for the future were dashed, gone forever. They could not see any way out, any way forward. But, as we know, that was not the end of the story.
And, so it is for us: we may be encountering much by the way of setbacks and difficulties, such as make it rather iffy to even imagine a ‘way forward’. But, once again, that is not the end of the story. God is still here and still at work, and He will work in our world, our churches and our own individual lives. That is the promise, and the reality, of Easter. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Forward notes: “Few of days and full of trouble” (verse 1b).
“As a hospice chaplain, my very first funeral was for Flo, a Jewish woman who had been a card shark in Atlantic City when she was younger. I am terrible at cards, but Flo was her old self when we played. Although she
could not remember the names of family members, she remembered how to play cards. The staff at the nursing home would gather round in amazement. Her family shared that Flo had a hard life, and although her days were not exactly few (she lived into her 80s), her life had been full of trouble.
“Yet her funeral was a joyous occasion during which I honoured her religious tradition as best I could, not invoking Christ but the God of love we both believed in. Flo taught me that despite the tenuousness of life, despite the troubles, there is still room for joy. Holy Saturday is that in-between space—after trouble, before joy. Be here now.”
Moving Forward: “If you can, attend an Easter Vigil this evening and experience the transition from the sorrow of Christ’s death to the joy of his resurrection.”