5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

          Anyone with little or no exposure to Christianity and to Catholicism in particular, and who might have walked in to hear that first reading from Job would undoubtedly say, “See! I told you this was a religion of gloom and doom.”  “Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?  Are not his days those of hirelings?  He is a slave who longs for the shade…I shall not see happiness again.” 

But we have to remember Job’s situation.  If you recall the story, he has, after all, just lost everything, his riches, his home, his children, and his health.  So, he’s not just being overly dramatic here.  He’s not being a “whiner.”  He is really hurting.  And he is pouring his heart out to God.  He is lamenting, which is something of a “lost art” in time.  We are culturally trained to keep up a “stiff upper lip,” or to “pick ourselves up” and carry on.  We numb ourselves with platitudes (“God never gives us more than we can handle”).  We try to find meaning in everything, even in suffering.  I don’t think we always let ourselves simply lament.  And so, oddly enough, I find a very consoling message in all this.

          I find consolation in Job’s honesty.  He is confronting life square on.  He’s not trying to “candy coat” anything, but just laying out his raw experience there for us.  This is consoling because we can identify with this.  This speaks to our own human experience (and I know that I don’t even know the half of it at my age.)  We suffer loss, we lose those we love, we get sick, we hurt.  I think many more people would rather hear this that some sort of sugary sweet vision of life—people would write that off in an instant, but Job…they can identify with Job.  Here is one who is truly in solidarity with suffering humanity.  And it’s not just that “misery loves company,” as though we enjoy this kind of spiral of suffering and self-pity, but that in our shared experience of suffering we are actually bolstered; we are lifted up and begin to emerge from our suffering.  As the saying goes, “A burden shared is a burden halved.”  When all else is lost, we at least want to know that we are not alone.  And the Book of Job gives us this sense.  Of course, this is not the only place in the Scriptures where we encounter this.  The Bible is full of, in a sense, “sad stories,” but also beautiful, redemptive stories.  Certainly, we can look at the Book of Lamentations, many of the psalms, the “Suffering Servant” passages of Isaiah, and, of course, in the New Testament, we can look to the example of Jesus Himself, who fully entered into our human experience and who, like Job, met the reality of suffering “square on.”  And so, yes, a passage like our first reading today may seem to be all “gloom and doom,” but really there is a hidden consolation in it.  

          I think we can draw some real consolation from this reading, because in a way it is teaching us, using that age old technique of the via negativa (or negative way), that life without God is, in fact, “a drudgery,” a kind of slavery.  Of course, Job is not really abandoned by God (nobody is), but in his felt experience he feels like God is nowhere to be found, and this produces, in a sense, an even deeper sadness in Job than simply the sadness of loss.  In counseling they always say that you can never “argue with” or “invalidate” a person’s experience.  Whatever the reality of the situation Job feels as though God is absent, and this exposes, I think, that deepest longing of our hearts for God.  We can tolerate a great deal and keep “soldiering on,” but if we feel as though God is absent, we are miserable—so much have we been made for God.  But if we know that God is with us (even if we do not at every moment feel His presence), then life (though difficult) is still in a peculiar way beautiful, redemptive, meaningful.  Even in Job’s lament, in this very honest pouring out of his soul, he has not lost faith—in fact, it is God whom he addresses in his lament.  He knows that, somehow, even in the midst of all of this God is there and that He is listening.  And this in itself brings a kind of consolation.

          I think we can see this same kind of thing going on in our second reading as well, in the person of Saint Paul.  Job talks about life on earth as a kind of “slavery,” and Paul talks about making himself the “slave” of others.  He says, “I have made myself a slave to all so as to win over as many as possible.  To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak.  I have become all things to all, to save at least some.”  Certainly, Paul was no stranger to suffering in his life of service to the Gospel: beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks, and constant rejection.  Still, in all of this—even as he speaks of being a “slave”—I don’t pick up a sense here that Paul is just being a “complainer,” or that he is throwing himself a “pity party.”  He is, like Job, expressing his experience openly, honestly, meeting suffering “square on.” 

But there is something even greater going on in Paul, I think.  In Job, yes, I think there is an underlying faith, but in Paul there is in his words more than just faith, there is an underlying joy.  Paul not only tolerates what life throws at him without losing his faith, but can even find a kind of joy in knowing that he is identifying with Christ Himself and that God is using him in these ways for the building up of His kingdom.  The joy of Paul points, I think, to the fact that in Jesus Christ there is a new and deeper consolation than what we find in the pages of the Old Testament.  We know that God is with us because in Christ He truly became one of us.  Jesus is truly Emmanuel, “God with us.”  And not only is Jesus with us, but He comes as our healer, as is made so abundantly clear our Gospel today.  Jesus heals us—physically sometimes, according to His will, but always spiritually, giving us consolation and spiritual strength in the midst of our trials.

          I am reminded of a conference given several years ago by Abbot Marcel Rooney, former Abbot Primate of the Benedictines, to the newly ordained priests of the four dioceses of Iowa.  He took us through the homily that is provided for the bishop in the Rite of Ordination of Priests.  And he was able to draw out from the Latin text some of the rich meaning that didn’t always “translate” into the English.  In a part of the homily, it talks about the role of the priest in the celebration of each of the sacraments.  For the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick it uses the Latin word “sublevante” to describe the priest’s role in that sacrament.  In other words, he is to get down underneath – “sub” – and raise up – “levante.”  This is precisely what Christ has done for us in becoming one of us and in identifying in every way with human suffering.  He gets down underneath us and raises us up.  I think this must be what Paul had a sense of and even Job had a glimmer of in his misery.

          And so, let’s not in any way take from this week’s readings a message of “gloom and doom” and just look forward to something “cheerier” next week (hopefully), but let’s really “dive in” to the experience of Job, the experience of Paul and find that strange and hidden consolation that comes from knowing that God is with us in our suffering.  He is as close to us as our own skin—and, more than this, He offers healing in body, mind, and spirit.