Job and Remembrance

 

“I know,” said Job, “that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.”

We are all very familiar with those words,

whether we know them from Handel’s Messiah

or from Martha’s reprise of them in John’s Gospel,

or even from this bit of the book of Job, which is where it came from originally.

It's a funny old story, isn't it, this story of Job.

Do you know, nobody knows anything about it –

what you see is totally what you get!

Nobody knows who it was written, or when, or why,

or whether it is true history or a fictional story –

most probably the latter!

Apparently, The Book of Job is incredibly ancient, or parts of it are.

And so it makes it very difficult for us to understand.

We do realise, of course, that it was one of the earliest attempts someone made to rationalise why bad things happen to good people, but it still seems odd to us.

Just to remind you, the story first of all establishes Job as really rich, and then as a really holy type –

whenever his children have parties, which they seem to have done pretty frequently, he offers sacrifices to God just in case the parties were orgies!

And so on.

Then God says to Satan, hey, look at old Job, isn't he a super servant of mine, and Satan says, rather crossly, yeah, well, it's all right for him –

just look how you've blessed him.

Anybody would be a super servant like that.

You take all those blessings away from him, and see if he still serves you!

And that, of course, is just exactly what happens.

The children are all killed,

the crops are all destroyed,

the flocks and herds perish.

And Job still remains faithful to God:

“Naked I came from my mother's womb,

and naked shall I return there;

the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;

blessed be the name of the Lord.”

So then Satan says, well, all right, Job is still worshipping you,

but he still has his health, doesn't he?

I bet he would sing a very different tune if you let me take his health away!

So God says, well, okay, only you mustn't kill him.

And Job gets a plague of boils, which must have been really nasty –

painful, uncomfortable, itchy and making him feel rotten in himself as well.

Poor sod.

No wonder he ends up sitting on a dung-heap, scratching himself with a piece of broken china!

And his wife, who must have suffered just as much as Job, only of course women weren't really people in those days, she says “Curse God, and die!”

In other words, what do you have left to live for?

But Job refuses, although he does, with some justification, curse the day on which he was born.

Then you know the rest of the story, of course.

How the three "friends" come and try to persuade him to admit that he deserves all that had come upon him –

we've all had friends like that who try to make our various sufferings be our fault, and who try to poultice them with pious platitudes.

And Job insists that he is not at fault, and demands some answers from God!

Which, in the end, he gets.

But not totally satisfactory to our ears, although they really are the most glorious poetry.

Here's just a tiny bit:

“Do you give the horse its might?

Do you clothe its neck with mane?

Do you make it leap like the locust?

Its majestic snorting is terrible.

It paws violently, exults mightily;

it goes out to meet the weapons.

It laughs at fear, and is not dismayed;

it does not turn back from the sword.

Upon it rattle the quiver, the flashing spear, and the javelin.

With fierceness and rage it swallows the ground;

it cannot stand still at the sound of the trumpet.

When the trumpet sounds, it says "Aha!"

From a distance it smells the battle, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.”

Wonderful stuff, and it goes on for about three chapters, talking of the natural world and its wonders, and how God is the author of them all.

If you ever want to rejoice in creation, read Job chapters 38, 39 and 40. Indeed, my father asked me to read Job 39 at his funeral, which I duly did, with a brief explanation. And we read it to him a couple of times as he lay dying. He especially loved the bit about the warhorse that I quoted above.

And at the end, Job repents "in dust and ashes", we are told, and then his riches are restored to him.

But would even more children and riches really make up for those seven children who were killed?

I doubt it, which is one of the reasons it’s probably a story, rather than actual history.

But even still, Job makes one of the central declarations of our faith:

“I know, that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.”

“In my flesh, I will see God.” I wonder how much comfort that verse really is, when your cities are being bombed and your energy supplies disrupted, your children’s education interrupted and maybe you are even forced to flee your country and depend on the kindness of strangers for a roof over your head.

As has been happening, as I’m sure you know, in Ukraine over the past few months and, although things seem to be going badly for Russia just now, there is no sign of an end, or even a ceasefire. Many of you may know, or know of, Ukrainian refugees who are in this country temporarily until things improve. My sister-in-law is giving house space to one family, and I believe they are great friends, but naturally the family wants to go home. The son has already gone – he wanted to go and fight, but I think he has been persuaded to finish his university course first. But there are plenty of others – I know a girl who needs a room to rent; she has a good job that she can do remotely, but can’t afford a flat at London prices on Ukrainian wages!

You know, in many ways we have been very lucky here in the UK. Yes, this war is bringing increased energy prices – and increased profiteering by the energy companies – but we don’t, yet, have to suffer bombs and foreign soldiers stamping around killing the men and raping the women on the slightest provocation. Not yet, and I pray God we never will.

We were blitzed once, still just about within living memory – you can still see the scars in many local roads, with 1950s housing next to the 19th-century stock that remains. I pray it will be the last time, and I pray our armed forces will never be required to go and bomb foreign cities, too.

Today is the day we remember those servicemen and women who have given their lives in the service of their country. I don’t know about you, but I do know that I lost at least three relatives in the First War, two of whom have no known grave but are commemorated on the various memorials in and around Arras. The third one has a grave – my brother has just visited it and sent me photographs – in a tiny cemetery literally in the middle of nowhere, about two kilometres from the main road! And my father, and one of my grandfathers, saw service in the Second World War, too. I’m sure your families may have similar stories to tell, of people who served their country in this way. And, of course, not just those in the armed forces, but those who risked their lives bringing desperately-needed provisions across seas studded with enemy submarines, or who were dropped “behind the lines” to help the Resistance movements. And the countless millions whose lives were simply interrupted by the way – evacuated to safe areas, or directed to jobs that helped the “war effort”, such as making munitions or working on the land. All these we remember, too.

There are those who say that Remembrance services glorify war.
I think not.
They are not easy, of course.
For those who have been involved in war,
whether actively or by default because their whole country was,
they bring back all sorts of memories.
For those who have not been involved, they can seem irrelevant.

Many Christians, too, think that all fighting and killing is wrong,
and refuse to join the armed forces, even in a time of conscription.
I’m inclined to agree, I have to admit, but for one thing –
do we really want our armed forces to be places where God is not honoured?
That’s the big problem with Christian pacifism –
it leaves the armed forces very vulnerable.

We must, of course, do all we can to bring peace.
But almost more important is to bring hope.
To bring the good news that
Job, and then Jesus proclaimed.
“I KNOW that my Redeemer lives.”
“God IS the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”

We all find the concept of eternal life enormously comforting, of course.
You may well have known people who have died very suddenly; I know I have.
We may have known people who have been the victims of terrorist attacks, or just the random shootings and stabbings that seem to have happened far too often recently.
And we wonder, as Job must have done, where God is in all this.
Job, we are told, never lost faith –
but many people did when they saw the horrors of war.

But if God grants people eternal life,
if this life is not all there is,
if the best bit is still to come,
then death isn’t a total, unmitigated disaster.
Of course it is a disaster.
Of course we hurt, and ache, and grieve, and miss the person who has gone.
But we can know they haven’t gone forever, and it does help!

“In my flesh I shall see God.” It may not be much comfort when God seems far away and the enemy near, but it is something to hold on to in times of trial.

I certainly believe in eternal life!
Some preachers will say that God limits those who can get into heaven to those who have professed faith in Jesus,
but I think it is rather we who exclude ourselves than God who excludes us.
People who are seriously anti-God,
seriously anti-faith,
wouldn’t be comfortable in eternal life, would they?

God is a God of love, a God who delights in us,

who loves each and every one of us so much that Jesus came to die so that we can have eternal life.
“I KNOW that my Redeemer lives and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.”

What Belongs to God

Sadly, I messed up the recording for this service!

I don’t know about you, but since the pandemic began I’ve hardly ever paid cash for anything.
I tend to use contactless payment via my phone, and even in places like France or Germany, which were far slower off the mark to adopt contactless payments, most places now accept cards.
But cash is still there, and for some things you have to use it.

And we’re used to our coins, aren’t we –
we barely even notice that they have a picture of the Queen on one side, and a few odd remarks in Latin printed round the picture.  The first coins featuring King Charles are to be issued next month, I understand, starting with a 50p piece.  

Our coins basically say Elizabeth, and will say Charles.
and then DG, which means by God’s grace;
Reg, short for Regina, means Queen or Rex, which means King,
and FD means Defender of the Faith –
a title, ironically, given to Henry the Eighth when he wrote a book supporting the Pope against the Protestant Reformation,

long before he wanted to divorce Katherine of Aragon and had to leave the Catholic church.

When I was a little girl, though, before decimalisation, coins were even more interesting, as they didn’t all have pictures of the Queen on –
the old shillings, sixpences, florins and half-crowns had often been issued during the reign of George the Sixth and pennies were often even older –

it was not unusual to find a penny that had been issued during the reign of Queen Victoria, even!
We didn’t have pound coins back then;

they were always banknotes
and there was also a banknote for what we now know as 50p, but was then called ten shillings.
It was quite a lot of money back in the day
a useful amount for visiting godfathers to tip one!

My father used to make us guess the date on a coin,
based on which reign it was, and if we were right we got to keep it

Not that we ever were right, so it was a fairly safe game for him,

but it made sure we knew the dates of 20th-century monarchs!

Different countries have different things on their coins, of course;

if you look at Euro coins, they have a different design on one side depending on which country issued them:

the German ones have a picture of the Brandenburg gate, or a stylised eagle;

the Irish ones have a harp.

Those Euro countries which are monarchies have a picture of their monarch on them,

and the Vatican City ones have a picture of the Pope!

This convention, of showing the monarch on your coins, dates back thousands of years, and was well-known in Jesus’ day.

But unfortunately, this raised a problem for Jesus and his contemporaries,

as the Roman coins in current use all showed a picture of the Emperor,

and the wording round the side said something like “Son of a god”, meaning that the Emperor was thought to be divine.

You might remember how the earliest Christians were persecuted for refusing to say that the Emperor was Lord, as to them, only Jesus was Lord? Well, similarly, the Jews couldn’t say that the Emperor was God, and, rather like Muslims, they were forbidden to have images of people, either.

So the Roman coins carried a double whammy for them.

They got round it by having their own coins to be used in the Temple –

hence the moneychangers that Jesus threw out, because they were giving such a rotten rate of exchange.

But for everyday use, of course, they were stuck with the Roman coins.

And taxes, like the poll tax, had to be paid in Roman coinage.

You might remember the episode where Jesus tells Peter to catch a fish,

and it has swallowed a coin that will do for both of their taxes.

But that was then, and this is now.

Now, Jesus is in the Temple when they come to him –

in the holy place, where you must use the Jewish coins or not spend money. “They”, in this case, are not only the Pharisees,

who were out to trap Jesus by any means possible,

but also the Herodians, who actually supported the puppet-king, Herod.

The question is a total trick question, of course.

They come up to Jesus, smarming him and pointing out that they know he doesn’t take sides –

so should they pay their poll tax, or not?

If he says, yes you must, then he’ll be accused of saying it’s okay for people to have coins with forbidden images;

it’s okay to be Romanised;

it’s okay to collaborate with the occupying power.

And if he says, no don’t, then he’ll be accused of trying to incite rebellion or terrorism.

So Jesus asks for a coin.

I expect it was the Herodians who produced one –

the Pharisees would probably not have admitted to having one in their pockets, even if they did.

And he asks whose image –

eikon, the word is –

whose image is on the coin?

And they said, puzzled, the Emperor’s of course, whose else would it be?

And we all know what he said next:

Give to the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor;

give to God what belongs to God.

It’s kind of difficult, at this distance, to know what he meant.

Was he saying we need to keep our Christian life separate from the rest of life?

God forbid, and I mean that!

If our commitment to God means anything at all,

it should be informing all we do, whether we are at worship on Sunday

or at work on Monday

or out at the pub on a Friday!

There is a crying need for Christians in all walks of life;

whether we are called to be plumbers or politicians,

bankers or builders,

retired or redundant!

Wherever we find ourselves, we are God’s people,

and our lives and values and morals and behaviour need to reflect that.

So what is Jesus saying?

It’s about more than paying taxes or not paying them.

It’s not about whether we support our government or whether we don’t.

We know from Paul’s letters that in the best of all worlds,

Christians should pay their taxes and live quietly under the radar,

exercising their democratic right to vote and not taking part in violent overthrow of a legitimate government.

Doesn’t always work like that, of course, but by and large.

Maybe the clue is in that word image - eikon.

For are we not told that we are made in the image of God?

If our picture were on a coin,

it would say round the side “A child of God”–

not, as for the emperors, meaning that we are gods ourselves,

but meaning, quite literally, that we are God’s beloved children.

Sure, sometimes God’s image gets marred and spoilt, when we go astray. I’ve seen coins that have been buried in the earth for years,

and they go all tarnished,

and sometimes, if they’ve been there for centuries, they build up an accretion of gunk round them to the point that you can’t possibly tell what they are.

But even that gunk can be cleaned off, with care –

do you remember those ads where the man dipped a penny into some cleaner or other, and it came up bright and sparkling?

Maybe Jesus is saying that this is not an issue to divide people –

Caesar gets what belongs to him, which is the coin,

and God gets what belongs to him, which is us!

No need to choose –

you don’t have to be either a quisling or a resistance worker.

We don’t separate what belongs to Caesar from what belongs to God –

we give ourselves to God, and the rest follows!

Is it, then, about possibly owing a small amount of money in tax,

but owing God a far greater amount –

our very being?

Yes, that is definitely part of it.

It was, I think, fifty-one years ago last month that I first consciously said “Yes” to God;

and yes, that does make me feel old!

But the more I go on with God, the more it seems not only possible, but also sensible.

You see, God created us in His image and likeness,

and not only that, but God redeemed us through Jesus,

and empowers us, by the Holy Spirit.

So yes, we do owe God our very being –

we are created by him, and without him we wouldn't exist.

It's not so much that we owe him the duty of giving ourselves back to him –

we do, of course, but we know that!

It's more about not being able to fulfil our potential on our own.

We are made in God's image, but unless we allow God to indwell that image,

to empower it,

we will never really fulfil our potential as human beings.

So we owe it to ourselves, almost as much as we owe it to God,

to say “Yes” to him, to open ourselves to Him.

So we are made in God's image, and as such we owe it to both God and to ourselves to give ourselves back to God.

But we also owe it to God and to ourselves to make sure that our image reflects God.

We owe it to God and to ourselves to make sure our image reflects God.

There's a wonderful book by an author called Georgette Heyer,

I don't know if people read her much these days,

but this book is called “These Old Shades”, and in it, one of the characters –

a child –

is taken to Versailles and sees the king, and her rather sleepy reaction at the end of the evening is, “He is just like on the coins!”

I wonder whether anybody would recognise God after having seen us.

Would they say, “He's just like on the coins”?

The thing is, we do mar God's image in us –

I mentioned earlier how coins can be so covered in the gunk of ages as to be unrecognisable.

But coins can be cleaned, renewed, restored....

Our prayer of confession today was one of the alternate Anglican ones, which I have always loved for the words “We have wounded your love and marred your image in us.”

“We have wounded your love and marred your image in us.”

This, for me, reflects the fact that we are made in God's image, and that sometimes that image gets distorted.

I am well aware that this sort of thing is apt to make us all feel guilty, apt to make us feel we must be terrible Christians, and so on.

But that's so not what I want to do here.

After all, there are plenty of other ways of distorting God's image –

look at the Pharisees, for instance, who tried to turn God into a set of rules and regulations.

Or in our own day, look at some of the more extreme Christian sects in the USA.....

Yet all of those are following God to the best of their ability.

Yes, they have got things tragically wrong.

Yes, they are distorting, marring, God's image in them.

But they are not, I think, any more evil than you or I are.

And God will, I pray, help them find their way back.

Because that, in the end, is what God is all about.

God minds far more about our relationship with him than we do!

We wander off, we get lost, marring God's image in us,

distorting Christianity into something very much less than it is –

oh yes, I've been there and done that –

and yet, every time, the Good Shepherd pulls on his coat and wellies, grabs his crook, and goes looking for us to bring us back into the fold.

We don't have to do it ourselves.

Indeed, it's when we try that the distortions are apt to happen.

We just need to be open to allowing God to keep us clean and polished and ready for action!

The coins that bear the emperor's image on them need to be given to the emperor.

But the coins that bear God's image –

we ourselves, each and every one of us who names the name of Christ as Saviour and as Lord –

those coins need to be given to God, reflecting His glory, and allowing Him to work in our lives to make us more and more like Him, and more and more the people He designed us to be.

Amen.