I cannot hear the words of this reading from Job without the aria from Handel’s “Messiah” ringing through my head:

“I know that my redeemer liveth!”

It presages the Messiah, in joyous hope of salvation . . . but it is taken out of context. I hate to burst any bubbles, but as beautiful as this quote is, Job is not standing and joyously proclaiming the future Messiah. He is sitting, in dust and ashes, with boils all over his body and a piece of pottery with which to scrape them, and kvetching about all his ills, and about his friends’ accusations of wrongdoing, which he staunchly denies.

Job is a rich man brought low. He is not even an Israelite. All his oxen, camels, and donkeys are now gone. His children were killed by the house falling in. His servants have almost all been slaughtered. All the rest of his family, including his wife, have deserted him. He complains that his wife finds his breath repulsive; probably because of his illness. He has a lot of complaints, and good, sound reasons for them.

Job wants to have his words commemorated forever in stone. He believes there is a mediator for him--our translation says redeemer, but a closer word would be a vindicator. The Hebrew word used here is “ga’ali,” meaning “my vindicator”. It usually refers to a family member who will take revenge, stand for a debt, or mediate. It is unclear whether or not he means a divine redeemer.

No one knows the exact time when the Israelites began to believe in the resurrection. We know it was popular during the time of Jesus and Maccabees. The story of 1 Maccabees starts with the death of Alexander the Great, who lived from 356-323 B.C.E. 1 Maccabees was probably written somewhere after 104 B.C.E. It is not clear whether Job believes in a resurrection, though the words in this particular passage suggest he believes he will see God Perhaps he does believe in the resurrection, and believes he will be justified only when he has been raised.

Job sits in dust and ashes, with boils all over him, and argues theological doctrine with three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, who think he is being pig-headed and arrogant. To be fair, they do sit with Job for seven days in silence before saying something. Far from comforting him, though, and saying, “We care about you. We’ll take you in, feed you, house you, and clothe you,” or, “It’s terrible what you’re going through, but we’re here for you, and we’ll pray to God for you,” his friends make his life even more miserable, nit-picking lots of possible faults that might have caused God to curse Job and make him endure all this hardship. I don’t know about you, but even if my faith in God didn’t fail during such a tough time, I think their arguments would have pushed me over the edge. I would probably ask them to go away and leave me alone.

The book of Job is a teaching tale, probably post-exilic, meaning it was written sometime after the Israelites were carried off by the Babylonians, probably in the sixth century, B.C.E. Job is a lesson in faith in the midst of hardship. It was never meant to explain the reasons for those hardships. In fact, it asks some very difficult questions, such as, “why do the wicked prosper, while the innocent suffer?”

Job is worth reading, not because of all the kvetching and kvelling, but because there are many arguments we still hear today, such as the “blame the victim” slogan: “You must have brought it on yourself.” You might recognize some pop-culture philosophy here.

In the end, God silences Job with questions, humbling him. Then God rebukes Job’s friends, and returns all Job’s former riches to him, thus vindicating Job. The point of the story is not that suffering will be rewarded, but that we must be steadfast in adversity, in spite of suffering and turmoil. Job’s answer, if there is one, may be that Job cannot see the big picture, to see God’s reasoning behind all his suffering. God will requite in God’s own time.

The sequence of events leading up to today’s Gospel reading are interesting. Jesus has been confronted by the Chief Priests, Scribes, and Elders, concerning his authority. They are afraid to arrest him in front of the crowd, so they send spies, according to Luke, to try to trip him up with Roman authority and taxes. Mark and Matthew say these spies are Pharisees, and some Herodians, a partisan group of Herod’s. Jesus’ answer shuts them up for a while, whereupon the Sadducees jump in with the challenge in today’s reading.

The Sadducees are the rich ruling class, favored by Herod. They reject the writings of the prophets, belief in angels, and the resurrection. They are relatively few in number compared to the Pharisees, but they are wealthy and powerful.

Usually Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for their hypocrisy, but He does agree with them on many points of theology, which is why the Sadducees are after him. In today’s reading, the Sadducees want to trip Jesus up, mocking him because he obviously does believe in the resurrection. Jesus turns their story on its head, as he does with other traps laid for him.

Jesus tells them that God is the God of the living, not the dead, and quotes Genesis to back him up. Since he quotes from the Torah, the first five books of the modern Bible, which they accept, the Sadducees cannot dismiss him out of hand, as they would have had he quoted any of the prophets. His answer effectively shuts them up.

In all three of the synoptic Gospel accounts, Jesus has already ridden into Jerusalem on an ass, and then overturned the tables of the money lenders before this story takes place. Already the Sanhedrin, the governing body of the Jewish people, is trying to figure out how to get rid of him without the people becoming angry at them. He has just been confronted by Pharisees, Elders, Scribes, and now Sadducees, all of whom were frustrated in their efforts to make him look foolish and shame him in front of the crowds of people. Jesus now has some very powerful enemies--enemies he made on purpose, in order that his destiny be fulfilled. Jesus needed to die on the cross, because there would have been no resurrection without his death, and without the resurrection, our Christianity is meaningless. As he said, he had to die in order to send the Comforter--the Holy Spirit--to his apostles. Without the Holy Spirit’s work, there would have been no church, no ministry that eventually spanned the globe. Christianity would never have existed.

If there is an afterlife, and a resurrection, whether physical or not, as Jesus said there is, then we may suffer terribly in this life, but eternity is much more vast than we can imagine, and our suffering for a brief time on this earth is but a small mite in the eye of time. As painful and as horrible as it may seem in this lifetime, on this planet, it may well be that the joy and love we experience in that eternity may make all our troubles here seem insignificant.

When Lazarus was dead and his sisters, Mary and Martha were weeping, Jesus told Martha that Lazarus would rise. She told him she believed that Lazarus would be raised on the last day--the day of Judgment--along with everyone else. It never occurred to her that there could be a physical resurrection such as Jesus had planned for Lazarus. In raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus proved he was greater than death, as he proved it when he was raised from the dead at his resurrection. In doing so, he also proved that God is the God of the living, not the dead.

In the book of Job, Satan appears as “the accuser,” not the fallen angel who will be cast into the lake of fire in Revelations, nor even the evil one who tempts Jesus in the wilderness. By contrast, Jesus has now become our advocate--our vindicator, or redeemer--before the throne of God.

Thanks to the resurrection, we can joyously proclaim:

“I know that my redeemer liveth!”

Amen