June 21, 2015
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
First Reading: Job 38:1, 8-11
http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/062115.cfm
When we experience pain, we are tempted to blame. Deliberately inflicting pain on ourselves is unthinkable, so most pain is surprising, unexpected and (so we think) someone else’s fault. It is much easier when there is a person to take the blame, to be the scapegoat. It purges the foul stench of evil from among us. Yet when there is no one to take the blame, we have a problem. That’s when most of us start pointing our fingers at God, blaming the Almighty for all our ills. In the Bible, Job did the same thing and finally got an extraordinary and unpredictable response from the Lord.
Job’s Story
To set the stage for our short reading clipped from the end of Job, it would be worth remembering what the whole book is about. Job is a righteous man, so righteous in fact that the Lord boasts about him to Satan. When Satan claims that Job is righteous only because of the blessings he has enjoyed from the Lord, the Lord permits Job to be afflicted with all kinds of suffering—his wealth is stolen, his children die, his servants are murdered, his body is covered with sores. In the midst of his epic suffering, great sorrow overwhelms Job and he curses the day of his birth.
Who’s to Blame?
When his friends arrive to console him, they sit in silence for days before a conversation begins. The central problem confronting them is really a “blame game.” Job knows that he is righteous and wants to blame God for unfairly inflicting all kinds of suffering on him. His friends try to convince him that he must somehow deserve all of the suffering he is experiencing, even if it is because of a hidden fault. Job continues to insist on his blamelessness and wants to enter into a lawsuit against the Lord, to prove his innocence.
Unfair Suffering
What is fascinating about this conversation is how it recapitulates our own experience of suffering as punishment. We instinctively think of all suffering as a form of punishment and that someone must be to blame for the pain that is coming upon us. When we experience undeserved suffering, our first response is not “That’s sad,” but “That’s unfair!” Job accuses God repeatedly over a series of many chapters and tries to provoke him to a legal encounter where he can make his logical arguments and prove his innocence. Job hopes for vindication.
The Lord Responds
After keeping silent throughout Job’s lengthy discussions with his friends, the Lord finally intervenes at the end. Our short reading from Job 38 includes the first verse of this response and a snippet about God’s power over waves and storms. One would expect, after all of the accusations Job makes against the Lord, that he would come and respond to Job’s arguments on a point-by-point basis. But he doesn’t. Instead, he launches into a blistering series of seventy questions, which he launches at Job one after another. The Lord does not give in to Job’s interpretation of the circumstances. Rather, he responds to Job’s pain with his presence. He shows up on the scene and reduces Job to silence. He asks Job questions about creation, about the cosmos, the rain, the snow, the sea and then he asks him about animals like lions, goats, the oxen, and birds.
Job is Silenced
Through this bewildering array of questions about creation, the Lord shows his infinite wisdom, his unlimited power, his just government of the universe. The implication is clear—before the Almighty Lord of the universe, haughty accusations must give way to a posture of silent submission. After the Lord’s long series of impossible-to-answer questions, Job replies, “Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee? I lay my hand on my mouth” (Job 40:4 RSV). How could anyone reply to the Lord’s challenging questions with anything but silence?
Power Over the Sea
In our particular passage, the Lord emphasizes his power over the chaotic abyss, which is why this passage is paired with the Gospel of Jesus calming the storm. The metaphors in the Job passage are a bit strange to our ears. When God speaks out of the storm or whirlwind, he pictures the sea as a newborn baby. The Lord swaddles the “baby sea” in clouds and darkness, and then limits its extent. For the ancients, the sea was so powerful and unpredictable, it seems as though it could have swallowed all the land, but God stopped the sea, closed the “doors” of the sea at the shore and even barred the gate. By his will, the sea laps the shore, but does not overwhelm it. The Lord sets a limit to its tumult.
While the Lord never answers Job’s accusations directly, what he does do in Job 38-39 might provide not the answer that we were looking for, but the one we need. Job had been shaking his fist at God, pointing a finger of blame at him and wanting all the unfair suffering he had experienced to be acknowledged as such. He wanted to sue the Lord and win the lawsuit. Yet God does not respond to Job’s pain, anger, and arguments with just more counterarguments. He answers Job’s pain with his presence. God shows up on the scene and challenges Job on an existential level. For the Lord, it is not about solving the fairness/unfairness blame game, but about revealing who he is—the Creator of the Universe. He plays the divine trump card and reduces Job to an awed silence. When we suffer and are tempted to bring a lawsuit against God like Job did, it might be good to look back at these passages, and to remember that the Lord of storm and sea is present with us in our pain. His presence is always greater than our pain.
