Job 1:6-22; Luke 9:46-50
Naked I came forth my mother’s womb / and naked shall I go back again.
They say that the way to overcome a fear of public speaking is to imagine the people in the audience naked. To be naked is to be ordinary. Just who we are. Any body.
They say that clothes make the man and clothes make the woman but they don’t really. God makes the man and God makes the woman. Clothes are just the way we try to make ourselves: make ourselves look better, makes ourselves look more powerful, makes ourselves look more important than other people.
The sin in the garden wasn’t that we were naked but that we were ashamed to be: ashamed to be ourselves. Wanting more than what we have, which is everything, in Christ.
To be naked is to be who we really are and the insight of Job is that this is just true: this is how we come into the world and this is how we leave, without armor, without protection, without power.
What happens to Job happens to us all in some way or another. We have setbacks, failures, tragedies, losses, and at those moments we realize that no amount of virtue or effort or faith can protect us from suffering or save us from death. Only God can. Only Christ–
–who was naked on the cross, stripped of all that is cheap and false, exposed as weak—even God, become naked as a child—but not ashamed, glorious at even this moment, absolutely real, as we should not be ashamed, as through the suffering of this one vulnerable naked man we are all redeemed, all of us made glorious in our true selves, all children again, all blessed.