This evening I have been invited to join the good people of St Nicolas’ Church in Chute for Evensong. It’s been a while since I attended Evensong, and I am really looking forward to it.

We are living in difficult times, and we just seem to reel from one disaster to another: the pandemic hasn’t completely been put to bed as those with long-covid will testify. It has been a year since Russia invaded Ukraine, a side-effect of which has been a hike in fuel prices, war continues in Syria and now, along with Turkiye has been devastated by earthquake. Just like Job, we may want to question why God is allowing any of this to take place.

Job is the archetype for suffering: a good man, a well-respected man in business and family matters, a man of faith, and yet God allowed Job to lose everything. Job’s children die in tragic incidents, he loses his wife, his business, his home, his health. His ‘comforters’ just aren’t comforting in any way, and eventually Job loses the plot with God. Job doesn’t stop believing in God, he just becomes very very angry, and understandably so too. Job wants to know why, why his family died, why he lost his business, his home, why he is in such permanent pain. God doesn’t smite Job for daring to ask such accusatory questions, God listens, and responds.

God doesn’t apologise though, or even explain, instead God reminds Job of how powerful God is, Job is reminded that God rules over all creation, even the most fearsome of beasts. The pain and sorrow which Job is currently experiencing is still less than God’s power. Perhaps if we were to be given such an answer for our own suffering we might not take it as well as Job, but for Job, just being taken into God’s presence and having his anguish taken seriously was enough to restore his faith. God doesn’t console Job, doesn’t wave a magic wand and make everything better, God invites Job into his presence, or perhaps God meets Job in his own predicament. The story of Job tells us that bad things happen to good people, that God doesn’t always bring the healing we hope for, that life doesn’t always make sense to us.

The Book of Job is believed to be the oldest book in the Bible, but fast forward a few hundred years, and Paul is writing to the church at Colossae, in times of suffering. The current Emperor is Nero who has been described as cruel and insane; Nero was the first Roman Emperor to actively persecute Christians, Paul is in prison because of this, his own identity as a Roman citizen having been conveniently ‘overlooked’. Colossae itself had once been a thriving centre of business but is beginning to lose its power, its demise exacerbated by earthquakes in Ad 17 and again in AD60. Paul writes in the years immediately following the second earthquake.

The purpose of Paul’s letter isn’t to bring a cosy hug to the Colossians, but to set them straight regarding some of their theology which had become a little heretical, and to remind them of just who it is that they worship in Jesus. There are echoes here of Job’s response from God: a reminder that there is a power that is greater than all he tragedies which are befalling them, a power that has existed long before anything else, and which is superior over all of creation.

In Jesus, though, the Colossians are also given hope: Jesus is God, the first born of all creation, but also the firstborn from the dead. Life as a Christian under Nero’s persecution is deadly, but Jesus, having experienced both, has authority over life and death. Life is not easy right now (or even then), but it isn’t the whole story, nor has it ever been. The world is not at peace with its creator, but that is just what Jesus came to do, and by the power of his death on the cross is bringing to fruition. It may not feel like it, but from God’s perspective outside of time, that is exactly what has happened.

Perhaps that is why the Psalmist is able to sing

Be joyful in the Lord, all the earth;

Psalm 100:1

Not because life is beautiful, not because everything is perfect in the world, but because no matter how big the troubles of the world seem to be, but because God is bigger, and Jesus’ redeeming love is stronger.

Read todays Bible passages here.

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