Saturday, July 3, 2004
The Martyrs Hyacinth and Theodota
Kellia: Job 42:10-17 Epistle: Romans 16:1-16 Gospel: St. Matthew 9:9-11
Job 42:10-17 LXX, especially vs. 10: "And the Lord prospered Job: and when he prayed
also for his friends, He forgave them their sin: and the Lord gave Job twice as much, even double of what he had before."
It is in the restoration of Job that the Faithful discover the type of our fully completed renewal in Christ. How readily we
are able to perceive the foreshadowing of the Lord's Passion in the stripping of 'life' from Job in successive blights! The
devil has his pleasure in removing the outward supports of household, goods, and chattel from Job, of shattering the "hedge
about him" which had served as the Prophet's tangible blessing from God (Job 1:10). Next, he assaults Job's own "flesh
and blood" in the catastrophic death of his children; and, in a final touch, Satan strikes the Prophet's own physical
members, "his bones and his flesh" (Job. 2:5), reducing them to nothing but boils and corruption, so leaving the broken
man nowhere to exist other than upon a dungheap, the ultimate figure of death.
Indeed, let us behold the renewal of our flesh in the restoration of Job even to "double of what he had before" (Job 42:10).
The devil did his utmost, and Job, as the type of the saving God-man, in refusing to "say some word against the Lord, and
die" (Job 2:9), prefigures what Panayiotis Nellas calls the liberation "of human nature from enmity toward God and from
enslavement to the devil." As "the Lord's wounds become the means of healing for humanity," so Job's suffering is the
precursor of the "one hundred seventy years" after his affliction (Job 42:16). As St. Nicholas Cabasilas says, "It was when
He mounted the Cross and died and rose again that the freedom of mankind came about, that the form and the beauty were
created."
Likewise, in mounting the dungheap and there refusing to curse God, Job defeats Satan's scheme to besmirch him, a
faithful suffering servant of God, a "harmless, true, blameless, godly man" (Job 2:3). No, rather, he resolutely "cleaves to
innocence" and thereby overturns the dark powers. How profoundly Job models the Suffering Servant Who was to come!
Panayiotis Nellas points out that, by His descent "to death, the Logos renewed humanity in general and made it incorrupt
along with the human nature which He had assumed and by means of it." By accepting his 'death' on the dungheap, God's
suffering Prophet Job reveals and foreshadows the ultimate destiny of human nature in Christ, manifesting in himself,
through his tormented flesh, the laying aside of mortality by Christ.
When Christ our God recast human nature, raising it up in a new, imperishable, and spiritual body, He disclosed the true
human body, the "spiritual body" (1 Cor 15:44), that is free from the limitations of time and space and is endowed with
new spiritual senses and functions - what Panayiotis Nellas calls "the resurrected blessed flesh of the Lord" in which all the
Faithful in Christ partake. Hence, Christ "creates a new place for [renewed men] to live. And this place is His body."
Notice "the new place" and condition in which Job lives when the Lord prospers him: a place in which he prays for his
friends, and they receive the forgiveness from God (Job 42:10). As St. Gregory the Great notes: "he makes his prayers
more powerful in his own behalf who offers them also in behalf of others."
The doubling "of what [Job] had before" (vs. 10) also typifies the new Life in Christ. His daughters represent the new Day
that has dawned in Christ, the sweet smelling savor (cassia) of His pure offering, and the "cornucopia," the limitless horn of
grace that showers the Faithful (vs. 14). Truly, Job has been raised with those whom the Lord raised up from Hades (vs.
17). May we who read of Job, imitate his valiance, compete with him in patience, that...nobly standing up to the ambushes
of the devil, we may obtain all that Thou dost give, O Christ.
