Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today’s Old Testament reading from the book of Job describes the bit of the story where Job finally comes to terms with God (read it here). Job has lost everything, he has endured many long accusations from his friends, and he has complained bitterly to God in light of his inexplicable suffering.

In response, God speaks from the whirlwind, and for four withering yet wonderful chapters, he puts Job in his place. Finally, in this brief passage, Job can only accept God’s greatness, his ‘otherness’, and Job’s own finiteness in the face of God.

So important is this response for the Church’s self-understanding, that the Eastern Church reads this passage, along with God’s initial response in Job 38:1-25, together at Vespers on Holy Thursday, only days before the Paschal Mystery is celebrated. The message of these readings is clear: God is mystery, and our basic posture is to stand before him.

What do I mean by mystery? Not that we do know nothing about God, or that we shrink in his presence from fear of the unknown. Rather, God is mysterious in the sense that we cannot know him fully, cannot comprehend him, cannot bottle God up in our rational explanations.

Job understood this in the end, and declared that now he enjoyed a new vision of God. ‘But now my eye sees you’ (verse 5). This ‘vision’ can only be spiritual knowledge of God, what Isaac of Syria called ‘the faith of divine vision.’

That spiritual knowledge did not come easily for Job. It was the result of humility, repentance, and the fear of God. These things do not come easily or naturally to us either. We would rather think about God (indeed, much theologizing is just that) and make up our own minds about him.

However, Job, the Scriptures, and Tradition teach us unanimously that we cannot find God with our minds. Instead, we find ourselves standing before God in worship, in awe, in silence; transfixed in the glory of God’s presence, our senses filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of worship. Only as we accept this mysterious reality does the gift of spiritual ‘vision’ grow within us.

This would seem to be the beginning of our faith, the beginning of our Christian life, the beginning of all theology: standing before God, who is mystery, in humility, in repentance, and in the fear of God.

Yours in Christ,
Justin