26th Week in Ordinary Time, Monday, October 2,2006

Scripture: Job 1:6-22. Psalm 17:1-3,6-7. Luke 9:46-50

Job is one of the greatest Wisdom books ever written and we start with it this Monday. We will have excerpts from Job throughout this week. I had heard from a doctor I met who lived most of his life in Israel, that this is the most difficult book in the Hebrew Bible or the Tanakh. He told me about the Aramaisms in it and some of the vocabulary which baffle experts and interpreters. Not only is it a fantastic story in chapter one and its epilogue, the rest of the story is really what is the heart of this Wisdom piece of literature.

had the following reflection about it after reading it late Sunday afternoon: Job did not sin in all of this story. He did, however, question the traditional way that wisdom thought was looking at the problems caused by suffering and evil. He did not accept the traditional answers but probed questions that normally were not permitted in his time. So our inspired author sets Job in a story outside of Israel and makes sure that Job is not from Israel, but is a righteous man. With such a setting the author is able to push the envelope of customary religious thought. It is more a philosophical work that asks the hard questions. We all wonder why bad things happen to good people and why some very good things happen to bad people, but very few of us have probed into these happenings as the writer of Job does. His friends are really of no help or ultimate support. They are in the end well-wishers who do nothing to help Job and certainly do not solve the problem he is wrestling with. They could not in their wisdom ever get to the depth of Job's questions and reasoning about suffering.

All of us are familiar with the famous lines from chapter one: "Naked I came forth from my mother's womb, and naked I shall go back again. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." This is the initial response of Job but as the scroll unfolds, it is not the best answer. So we ask, is there an educative value to human suffering? Is submission to God's will the best answer? Like Job we wrestle with the problem of evil and suffering and we are baffled why God permits it or even better why we permit it. Job offers us some ways of pondering it over which may help teach us probe a little deeper into this mystery. I liked what a Jesuit priest said about Job: "This is not, as we have remarked, a speculative solution; the author does not offer Job's experience as a way to understand evil, but as a way to live with it. The experience of Job is that one can support evil only when one experiences a theophany, an insight into the reality of God. Without this insight the problem ultimately drives one to the solution of the Mesopotamian poet; there is really no difference between good and evil. Before evil, human wisdom and human reason are bankrupt; the book of Job ends with the conviction that only faith makes evil tolerable, faith which brings insight through the experience of God which is within the reach of one who desires it."