The Sadness of Mortality

15You would call, and I would answer you; you would long for the work of your hands. Job 14:15

Instead of the usual way we think about prayer, calling out to God and hoping for God’s response, in his agony Job is envisioning a time when God would call out for Job, because God would be lonesome for his creature.

Since creatures are mortal, Job first says, why do you have to bother them. Let them at least enjoy their short lives before they pass away.

But then Job envisions a time of God’s protection “Oh that you would hide me in Sheol… conceal me until your life is past… appoint me a set time, and remember me!...

“All the days of my service I would wait until my release should come….”  God would seal away all Job’s sin, protecting Job from God’s own anger. That God, too, would long for their former closeness is Job’s passionate hope.

But right now all he knows is his own pain, so intense he is trapped in it and can’t even think about his own children.

(Job’s children of course had all just been killed by God in Chapter 1, Verse 19).

This wistfulness is found in Psalm 42 “These thing I remember, as I pour out my soul/how I went with the throng…a multitude keeping festival” (Ps 42:4).

I also find this sadness for mortality in the phrase “Jesus wept” (John 11:35) at the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead; but he wept for the sheer mortalness of our existence.