約伯倫理 第 317 章

Ver. 7. The things which my soul before refused to touch, now, by reason of distress, are my food (Job 6:7). 10. The words of Job are pregnant with a spiritual understanding. The Gentiles are foretold as about to seek the food of the law, and the Jews as not about to disdain the fellowship of the Gentiles. For he greatly falls into error who supposes the words of blessed Job to have been uttered for the history alone. For what great, or rather what true thing would the holy man, and one upheld by so many praises of his Creator, be saying, if he had said that unsavoury food could not be eaten? Or who had offered deadly aliments to his eating, that he should subjoin: 'Or can anyone taste that which, being tasted, brings death?' If we understand these things said of the friends' conversations, we are restrained from this understanding by the sentence subjoined, in which he says:

The things which my soul before refused to touch, now, by reason of distress, are my food. For far be it that the holy man, established in the soundness of his estate, should ever have despised the sayings of his friends—he who, as we afterward learned by his own testimony, was humble even to his servants. His words therefore are not void of mysteries, which, as we learn from the end of the history, the inward Arbiter also praises. Which words would by no means have run down even with such veneration to the ends of the world, had they not been pregnant with a mystic understanding. 11. Blessed Job therefore, because he is a member of the holy Church, let him speak also with her voice, saying:

The things which my soul before refused to touch, now, by reason of distress, are my food; because doubtless the converted Gentile world, anxious with the ardours of its love, hungers for the food of the ancient Scripture, which it once proudly despised. Yet these words also agree with the voices of Judaea, if they are discussed a little more considerately. For she from the instruction of the law, from the knowledge of the one God, had salt, and despised all the nations as brute animals. But because, instructed by the precepts of the law, she had scorned to receive the fellowship of the Gentiles unto herself, what else did she loathe but to take unsavoury food? For the divine sentence, with death set before them, had forbidden that the people of Israel should join a covenant with foreigners, and defile the life of holy religion (Exod.

23:32). Whence too it is subjoined: 'Or can anyone taste that which, being tasted, brings death?' But because this same Judaea, from the portion of the elect, was converted to the faith of the Redeemer, she busied herself to preach through the holy apostles the light she had known to the unbelievers of her own offspring. But the pride of the Hebrews repelled the service of her preaching. Whence presently she turned the words of her exhortation to the gathering of the Gentiles, as also it is said through those same apostles: 'To you it was necessary first to speak the word of God; but because ye have rejected it, and judged yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles' (Acts 13:46). Whence in this place too it is fitly subjoined:

The things which my soul before refused to touch, now, by reason of distress, are my food. For Judaea, having disdained the life of the Gentiles, once as it were refused to touch her, whose fellowship she scorned to receive; but coming to the grace of the Redeemer, and repelled by the unbelieving Israelites, while through the holy apostles she extends herself to the gathering of the Gentiles, she receives as it were in hunger for food that which she once fastidiously despised as unworthy. For she endured the straits of her own preaching, she who saw what she spoke despised among the Hebrews. But by reason of distress she ate the foods she had once contemned, she who, the hardness of the Jews having repelled her, desires to receive the Gentile peoples she had despised.

Since, therefore, we have spoken these things figuratively, it now remains for us to inquire into them morally. The moral sense. — 12. The holy man, longing for the coming of the Redeemer under the name of a balance, while he opens himself to us through his words, instructs us in the earnestness of living; while he tells of his own concerns, he points to certain things that are ours; while he suggests things about himself which we may recognize as our own, he strengthens us who are anxious and weak toward hope. For now indeed we live through faith in the Mediator, and yet we still endure the harsh scourges of inward chastisement for the purging away of our vices. Whence also, after his desire for the balance, he adds: