There is no escape by Revd. Trevor Jamison

There is no escape!  There is no escape from Job, at least not as far as I am concerned. Like many people, my knowledge of this Old Testament book was pretty sketchy before I became a church minister. I knew that it was about suffering. I knew that Job was supposed to be a good person to whom bad things happened. I was aware that he had some friends to advise him, the proverbial “Job’s comforters”, and that they were not a great deal of use to him. I may have known that when confronted with God, towards the end of the book, Job receives a lecture on God’s majesty rather than an explanation of why things happened the way they did. I then managed to make it all the way through my ministerial training without my relative ignorance being much disturbed, except perhaps to discover that it was one of the Old Testament books that get described as “wisdom literature”, along with others such as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Then I agreed to tutor some people for the United Reformed Church’s Training for Learning and Serving Foundation Course and discovered that we spent an entire term, six meetings, using Job as the main biblical resource for our discussions. As a tutor, every other year, for the next few years I found myself having to return to Job. There really was no escape. By the end of this period I would warn course members, “Next term will either be the

high point or very lowest point of the course for you: we are going to explore Job.” Very few people felt neutral or unmoved by Job. Either they hated every moment, wondering how this book had been allowed to wander into the pages of the Bible or they were astonished and overjoyed to find a biblical book helping them to grapple with life’s big issues concerning pain, suffering and injustice.

 Upon moving South, to this pastorate I gave up Foundation Course tutoring and thought that I had managed to leave Job behind me in the North-East of

England – no such luck. Within a month of my arrival into the new pastorate the readings from the Revised Common Lectionary were inviting worship leaders to preach on Job and I duly obliged, not only in the three pastorate churches but even at Hutton and Shenfield Union Church. Still, I thought, that’s Job out of the way and I can get on with preaching from more cheerful stuff, like Leviticus and Lamentations. Wrong again. The RCL is a three-year cycle of readings and, believe it or not, I have been Minister in this pastorate for three years, so guess who’s coming to church on Sunday once again?

 Next month, October, it is time for Job to make a reappearance and those responsible for leading worship in at least two of our congregations will be gearing up for the challenge. I’m looking forward to coming back to Job just as we are all “coming back to church” after the summer break and somehow this feels appropriate. After all, why do we come (back) to church? Yes, firstly, we come to worship God but we also come for all sorts of human reasons, many of them good ones. We come for fellowship and friendship; we come for rest and recuperation from life’s stresses; but we also come in order to be better equipped to live life abundantly during the rest of the week. Exploring Job together is a real opportunity to face life’s realities together, a resource for living in the today’s world, just as troubled with pain and suffering as it was in the days when the Book of Job was written. Like Job, we may find few definitive answers but I’m confident that we’ll grow as seven-day-a-week disciples in the process of discovery and discussion.

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