Job's mystical hope (Cynthia Bourgeault)

   The book of Job… is perhaps the most relentless pilgrimage to the wellsprings of hope in all western literature.  Under the terms of a mythical cosmic wager between God and Satan, Job’s fortunes are suddenly and devastatingly upset.  Wives, children, goods, even his health are all taken away.  And as if this were not enough, his friends who arrive to comfort him set out systematically to destroy what little is left to him—his trust in a coherent universe and in his own innocence.

   Yet curiously, as the story unfolds, Job’s faith and hope seem to grow stronger and stronger… What seems to take wing in him is a single-hearted yearning to see God face to face, and a lyrical certainty that his redeemer lives.  In one of the most extraordinary passages every written, Job sits destitute amid the wreckage of what was once his life, and sings:

            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. 

                                                (Job 19:25-26)

   Nowhere in all of literature is there such a triumphant statement of mystical hope.

-- Cynthia Bourgeault, 

Mystical  Hope:  

Trusting in the Mercy of God (p.8-9)

Image source:  Marc Chagall, Job Praying (1960), 
https://uploads8.wikiart.org/images/marc-chagall/job-praying-1960.jpg