‘Then Satan answered the Lord: ‘Skin
for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch
out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh and he will curse you to
your face.’ The Lord said to Satan: ‘very well, he is in your power, only spare
his life...’
Job 2: 4 – 6
The Book of Job is not my usual reading material but I
regularly ponder on William Blake’s famous illustrations for the same, given
here. In these unprecedented times it seems right to return to these monumental
sources. This Plate, Number 6, illustrates Satan returning to earth to give
plague and pestilence to the upstanding, moral and seemingly undeserving Job.
Blake fills in the edges with illustrations suggesting that not only Job’s
health is ruined, but also his economic wellbeing and comfort – thistles grow,
creepy-crawlies abound and the yard is littered with rubbish and broken
potsherds. Things are looking bad for him. His wife lies mourning at his feet
whilst Job lies paralysed in agony, not even able to turn his palms upwards to
accept this willingly.
Yet, as always with Blake we need to look at the details
and catch the allusions he is giving us. The main clue is in the accompanying
quotation from the Book of Job:
‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and Naked shall I
return thither –
The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the
Name of the Lord.’
The fact that this quote seems to be hymned by a chorus of
tiny whirling demons only adds to the mystery.
There are more clues in the engraving. There amongst the
broken pots and rubbish are frogs and locusts... Now we begin to see the allusion.
Blake is pointing us to the other time God’s destroying angel sent a plague –
the Book of Exodus and the plagues sent to Egypt. Now we begin to see them all
in Blake’s engraving – locusts, frogs,
Aaron’s broken staff turned into a snake, those little demons again - don’t
they look like the gnats and the flies? -, Job’s boils, the darkness, the
thunder and hail... And immediately we know where all this is leading. To the
final great plague God will send on to the Egyptians – the Passover and the
killing of the first born:
‘For I shall pass through the land of Egypt that night, and
I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and
animals...’ Exodus: 12.12
This is all strong stuff and perhaps not what we want to
think about during the present crisis but is not a deeper truth being shown to
us? The plague, or Covid 19, is it not a sign, a signifier? The Sanskrit term
is a ‘Tirtha’ – a ‘crossing place’ – from the ordinary world to the
transcendent realm. All of a sudden, without any preparation we have been given
a crossing place. Our ordinary lives have been turned upside down as Satan
appears to dance grinning over our prone society. Yet, Blake appears to give
Satan a halo and was he not instructed by God himself to undertake this act? At
present Christians are also engaged in the sacred preparations of Lent -
deliberately and consciously preparing themselves for the ‘great crossing’ that
will happen in Holy Week as they move through the suffering of Christ’s passion
and death to the resurrection of Easter morning. Is this then not part of our
Lent? We are being asked to let go of our ordinary attachments and prepare
ourselves for the great deliverance that we are assured will come to us.
The incident portrayed here, as signified by Blake with an
enormous setting sun, is just the beginning of Job’s ‘night sea journey’. He
will have to suffer many more trials before the sun will rise again:
psychological and spiritual as well as physical and material. It seems as
though we too are just entering a ‘night sea journey’ as the sun goes down on
our everyday routines. I pray that wherever you are, however you are facing
this event, that, in solidarity with each other we approach it as mindfully as
possible, aware that, as the Upanisads say,
we have ‘two selves’. One that is basically selfish and will want only to fight
for our own survival, but also another, the transcendent part, that will be able
to cope with this, reflect upon it, and perhaps, like Job, eventually achieve
Wisdom through mindfully facing the inevitable suffering we are all about to
undergo.
God bless
Peter
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