Word to the Wise
Friday, October 1, 2010 - St. Therese of the Child Jesus, OCD, (The Little Flower) - virgin and doctor of the Church
[Job 38:1, 12-21; 40:3-5 and Luke 10:13-16]The Lord addressed Job out of the storm and said: Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place......Then Job answered the Lord and said: Behold, I am of little account; what can I answer you? I put my hand over my mouth. Though I have spoken once, I will not do so again; though twice, I will do so no more.
The Book of Job is a story with a happy ending which leaves one frustrated and unsatisfied! When God finally gives Job a personal response, Job is reduced to silence! But then God restores Job to his former prosperity - indeed to better than his former prosperity. Is all of his suffering to be only a vague bad memory? He and we are left without an "answer" to the WHY? What we get is a "response," not an answer! It sounds somewhat like: "Because I'm big and you're tiny!" I suspect the story ends the way it does because the storyteller could only be as mystified as we are in the face of the mystery of evil! Why do bad things happen to good people? Of course that last question does not exhaust the question of evil! Job deals primarily with the question of "undeserved" suffering. The context is also one of a personal nature in that Satan attempts to shake the faith of Job. God wins the "bet." What do we do in the face of "impersonal" evils like storms or cancer? Are they any different than unemployment, killers, hunger when the result is the same - great suffering? Does anyone "deserve" to suffer? Perhaps the great virtue of the Book of Job (besides being a wonderful piece of literature) lies in its ability to make us meditate on the questions I've raised above as well as many others. How do we deal with our dissatisfaction with God's response (if we are dissatisfied). Can we put ourselves in both the position of Job and of his "friends?" How would we advise or comfort Job? All of this makes the Book of Job worth reading time and again because the questions themselves are timeless! AMEN