Yahweh answered Job from the heart of the storm and said: Who is this that obscures counsel with words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a valiant man: I will question you, and you will instruct me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding…
JOB 38, 1-11
Yahweh answered Job from the heart of the storm and said:
Who is this that obscures counsel
with words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a valiant man:
I will question you, and you will instruct me.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements? Surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea with doors,
when it broke forth and issued out of the womb;
when I made the cloud its garment
and thick darkness its swaddling band;
when I broke up for it my decreed place,
and set bars and doors;
and said, ‘Thus far you shall come, but no further,
and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?
THE FOLLOWING VERSES ARE NOT READ AT MASS.
Then Job answered Yahweh:
“I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. …
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you.
Therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”
The book of Job raises one of the most serious problems for the believer: evil. In the common Jewish mentality, evil is the punishment for sin, and therefore the suffering of “the just” is entirely incomprehensible. This is the issue raised by Job: he has faithfully observed the Law and yet he is overwhelmed by all kinds of misfortunes.
His friends tell him to acknowledge that these misfortunes are the punishment for his sins, but Job maintains his innocence and cannot explain the evil that afflicts him. The author of the book offers the only solution he has: to appeal to the Supreme Authority of God: “Who are you to question God?” This means that he understands nothing, he continues with his problem, but he submits to God and renounces understanding.
This is a theme that we must accept as it is, without softening it, without going beyond what the Word shows us. We want to find an explanation for evil. We do not have it.
The suffering of the innocent, especially the suffering of children, is something that does not fit with our faith in God the Father, good and powerful. And we have no explanation. We believe in the Father, good and powerful, despite the fact that we cannot explain the problem of the suffering of the innocent.
The presence of this problem is dramatic in the life of Jesus himself. He is the most innocent, the Holy One par excellence. And, faced with passion and death, He seems to share with us all the darkness of suffering.
He manifests it dramatically in the Garden of Gethsemane, and more tragically when He recites on the cross the Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
There is no revelation that explains evil, the suffering of the innocent. Everything we invent to explain it is deficient: evil is necessary to contrast it with good, evil has the character of “redemption” for sin, evil makes sense as “merit for eternal life”… all this does not bear the idea that “the Father could have spared his children so much suffering.”
With the book of Job, but surpassing it through the knowledge of God that Jesus implies, we must accept that “the ways of God are not our ways” and that we have no solution to this issue.
But we do have reasons to trust Abbá – not only to submit to the Almighty – and to know that Jesus has not explained this, nor many other things. In this matter, Jesus’ position is clear: His life is a struggle against evil, and it is an important part of our mission.
Once again, the revelation of God in the N.T. prioritizes “God the Liberator” over “God the Lord.” Faith in “God the Lord” would rather ask for explanations. Faith in God the Liberator asks us to work with Him against the evil that afflicts His children.
This is one of the deepest meanings of Jesus’ miracles. The miracles of Jesus are of a “liberating” nature, in favor of the man oppressed by illness, by sin.
The presence of Jesus, the presence of God, in the world, is continuously accompanied by “signs of liberation,” which show, even more than words, in what God we believe, and what is expected of us.
CORINTHIANS 5, 14-17
For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.
The death of Christ is presented as the supreme act of love, a love in which we can know the love of the Father. These expressions have nothing to do with the vulgar concept of “redemption” (the death of Jesus as a bloody, expiatory, and vicarious sacrifice) but are in line with John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” or Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.”
Next, our response: to live for the Kingdom: neither our knowledge of people nor that of Jesus is as before, that is “the old.” We are offered a new way of living and thinking, with the criteria and values of Jesus, as if we had been created anew.
This new creation, new creature, is what is celebrated in baptism, with the symbol of “being freed from the waters, passing from the danger of death by suffocation to the light, to the air, to life in freedom, as a child of God.
José Enrique Galarreta