Narrative Lectionary Summer Series – Job, Week 3
Job 14:7-15; 19:23-27
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Furthering the Power of God’s Story – Narrative Lectionary Commentary
by Rev. Dr. Clint Schnekloth
In most of the Old Testament witness, when you’re dead you’re dead. The faith of Israel does not follow or foreshadow the theology of Plato—notions of an eternal soul that enters the body at birth and departs at death. Nor does it yet much anticipate the Christian novum of resurrection.
Instead, when you’re dead you’re dead, and perhaps at best the ancestors rest in a shadowy place, Sheol, lacking the vitality and life of earthly life.
So we have Job fully articulating this view of death. If he is to die, if others die, they will not sprout again as trees do. When humans die, they lie down and do not get up again.
At best, perhaps God might hide Job in Sheol in order to conceal him until God’s wrath is past. Certainly not a very bright hope, that.
But then, Job introduces something somewhat novel, something only hinted at in a few other places in the ancient texts, mostly in the apocryphal books.
First, he asks the question, which itself is a kind of hope for resurrection, even if it is not an expectation: will mortals live again? Waiting for release, waiting for God to call, that we might come, that God would long for the work of God’s hands enough to call mortals back from the nothing or resting of death.
Then in chapter 19, Job articulates an even stronger trust in some kind of life after death. Here again definitely not the Platonic notion that our spirit simply lives and departs the body at death. Rather, Job will really die, but then because God is alive, the “redeemer” or “vindicator” lives, so Job will “see God.”
Resurrection relies not on the eternal nature of the soul, but on the living voice of God.
And this voice, this God, Job will see “on his side” for himself.
No wonder this has remained such a famous line in the Old Testament corpus. It speaks in advance much of what we hear even more clearly from Jesus, when he says his God is the God of the living and not of the dead, and promises that those who trust in Christ will “see God.”
It’s wise for preachers on this text to take some time midweek to read all the passages that precede and surround these two texts. There is a lot of additional material, many other things happening between the early chapters and chapter 14, and between 14 and 19.
On the other hand, in this season of life, with the continuing instability created by the coronavirus, and our wonder over these summer months of what of our former life will survive it, and what we should anticipate now, centering exclusively on these texts can, if we let them, allow us to focus our eyes on the living God.
We may be dying or dead. But God is alive, and calling, and we will see God.
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Afterlife and Resurrection Beliefs in the Apocrypha and Apocalyptic Literature
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Great Quotes
““All soul is immortal. For that which is always in movement is immortal; that which moves something else, and is moved by something else, in ceasing from movement ceases from living. So only that which moves itself, because it does not abandon itself, never stops moving. But it is also source and first principle of movement for the other things which move. Now a first principle is something which does not come into being. For all that comes into being must come into being from a first principle, but a first principle itself cannot come into being from anything at all; for if a first principle came into being from anything, it would not do so from a first principle. Since it is something that does not come into being, it must also be something which does not perish. For if a first principle is destroyed, neither will it ever come into being from anything itself nor will anything else come into being from it, given that all things must come into being from a first principle. It is in this way, then, that that which moves itself is a first principle of movement. It is not possible for this either to be destroyed or to come into being, or else the whole universe and the whole of that which comes to be might collapse together and come to a halt, and never again have a source from which things will be moved and come to be. And since that which is moved by itself has been shown to be immortal, it will incur no shame to say that this is the essence and the definition of the soul””
A Good Read
Job: A New Translation
by Edward L. Greenstein
“Edward Greenstein’s new translation of Job is the culmination of decades of intensive research and painstaking philological and literary analysis, offering a major reinterpretation of this canonical text.”
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Free Dramatic Reading For This Text (NRSV)
Readers: Job
Job: “For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they? As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, 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. Oh 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! If mortals die, will they live again? All the days of my service I would wait until my release should come. You would call, and I would answer you; you would long for the work of your hands. O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! 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, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!”