Yesterday was about a Theos who could not be located. Today all three readings are about proximity, and they are arranged in an order that goes somewhere.

Job's move is legal, and it is the most audacious thing in the book. He has been complaining for ten chapters that there is no court, no umpire, no way to compel a hearing — and rather than abandon the case he invents the office he needs. A go'el is family before he is anything else. The duty to redeem attaches to the blood; the kinsman does not choose to owe it. So Job, on the ash-heap, having been told by three friends that his suffering is the verdict, asserts that the judge is also his next of kin and is therefore obliged to buy him back. He has no evidence for this. He says it anyway, and then says the thing that costs him more: I shall see him from my flesh, my own eyes and not a stranger's. He does not want a settlement. He wants to be in the room.

The psalm is the same appetite in a quieter register, and its honesty is in the grammar. If I had not believed I would see the goodness of Yahweh in the land of the living — and the sentence never finishes. The psalmist cannot say what would have happened, or will not; he breaks off, and the scribes who copied it flagged the verse with dots because they could feel the fracture too. Then, having not finished the thought, he turns and instructs himself: wait for Yahweh; be strong; wait. The word means to hold a cord under tension. It is what you do when the sentence will not close.

And then Luke, where the nearness stops being something asked for and becomes something carried. Seventy-two people are sent to seventy-two nations with no money, no bag, and no spare shoes, and the message they are given is one line: the reign of Theos has come near to you. They are not sent to argue it. They are sent to be near people while saying it, which is why the equipment had to go — a man with a purse can conduct a mission at arm's length, and a man without sandals cannot.

Put the three together and the shape is this. Job asserts a kinsman he cannot see. The psalm believes in a goodness it has not yet been shown, and holds on. Luke sends seventy-two unequipped people out to say he is close — to houses that will take it and houses that won't, in the same words, because the sentence is a report and not a compliment.

Which is where the memorial belongs. Thérèse Martin entered Carmel at fifteen, never left Lisieux, and died of tuberculosis at twenty-four; she is the patroness of the missions. The seventy-two went out and she did not go anywhere, and the Church, having thought about it, gave her the office anyway.