Notes for22 October 2020

Sounding between the 5th and 4th centuries B. C., simultaneously with the sermon of the last prophets of the Old Testament, these words integrated all the hope of humanity and all our hope for salvation. Two centuries did not pass from this day, when in the Babylonian captivity, God opened to the prophet Ezekiel His will on the resurrection of the death, and here, the author of the Book of Job makes of this revelation a definitive conclusion. Job, whose name became common for the designation of human sufferings, sees his salvation not in the fact that all his misfortunes will end: indeed, a genuine experienced suffering is not just so easy to obliterate from the memory. No, Job hopes that the glory of the Almighty will manifest itself in his suffering flesh. Pain and death, being until then signs of extreme estrangement from God, the Source of Life, become for Job a place of meeting with the Redeemer.

For the ancient East, not less than for the modern world, important is the faith of Job that "from dust" the same flesh, in which he suffers at the moment will be restored. In the first place, then becomes categorically improper the idea of "the reincarnation of the soul", abolishing the tragic experience of the genuine human life. And secondly, suffering stops to be the incarnation of a cruel fatuity only in the perspective of resurrection. Indeed, if man’s life ends with his death, then his suffering is only a sign of the victory of evil, and nothing more. No oblivion can heal the tragic life experience lived by man, it is impossible to forget a real suffering, just as last year flue. It is just impossible to neglect death - it can be overcome only with the intervention of the Redeemer , when in the resurrection of Christ, death stops to be such and becomes the Revelation of Life. Here we touch the secret of salvation, and hardly will it probably be rational to explain it. But we can aim for it, and this secret can become the only source of light in the darkness of the sadness.

Still in these words of Job sounds the completely inexplicable, unexpected hope in the fact that to man can be given in flesh to see the Invisible. The author of the Book of Job is unable to shift glance from this hope, and that is why he puts in the mouth of his hero the words: "though my reins be consumed within me.". Indeed, this meeting means the restoration of what was destroyed by Adam’s crime. Only the victory of the Redeemer on sin makes this meeting face to face possible again.