I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!
Job 19:25-27 (NIV)
He Says It Still Angry
Heat in the old wing takes about an hour, so the social worker who runs the Thursday group comes at six and turns it on, then sits in the back with her coat still buttoned while the pipes knock. She sets eleven chairs in a circle, and most weeks nine people come.
People who have buried someone say two opposite things in the same evening, and she stopped trying to reconcile them years ago. A woman says she can feel her husband in the house. Twenty minutes later, from the same chair, she says she is not sure anybody is there at all, and the man beside her tells her that is about where he has been since March.
Job does it in one breath. He tells his friends the hand of God has struck him and asks why they hunt him the way God does, and he wants his words cut into rock so they will still be on record when he is not around to make the case. Out of that, with nothing in between, comes the sentence people read at funerals. I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
His children were dead and his skin was going, and the friends around him had settled on the idea that the root of the trouble lay in him. He wanted somebody to stand up on his behalf. That is what he says he has, a redeemer who lives and who will be on his feet at the end of it.
Then he gives away what he is actually after, and he says it three ways in one line: I myself, my own eyes, I and not another. In his flesh, after his skin is gone, he will see God. How my heart yearns within me, he says. And then he turns back around and warns his friends about the sword, because saying it has not settled him at all.
I used to think a person in that chair wants a reason. They have been handed reasons all year by people who meant well. Mostly they want to be standing there when it is finally put right, and they want it to be them, in the body they have now, and not a secondhand account of it afterward.
At a quarter to seven she gets up and pushes one of the empty chairs into the gap.
A Prayer to Remember
There is a distance between what I say about you and what I can actually believe, and I am not going to pretend about it tonight. I want to be there. Whatever gets put right, and however long it takes, let me see it with these eyes. Keep the people I have been missing until then.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
