TWELFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B

[cappie]

 “How is it that you have no faith?” Our Lord’s question in today’s Gospel frames the Sunday liturgies for the remainder of the year, which the Church calls “Ordinary Time.” In the weeks ahead, the Church’s liturgy will have us journeying with Jesus and his disciples, reliving their experience of his words and deeds, coming to know and believe in him as they did. 

We know in life people suffer.  But we want to know why, and we want reasons, and we want it all to make sense.  This is where today’s First reading comes in. After insisting that he is innocent and God is to blame, Job once more demands to know “Why?” And the Lord answers Job out of the whirlwind and says what we just heard. Job asks “Why?” and God says, “(Where were you).. Who pent up the sea…”

Did you notice that what God says to Job is not comforting? It’s not reassuring, and it certainly doesn’t answer Job’s questions about why these terrible things are happening to him. In fact, God never says anything at all about Job’s troubles. Instead, what God says to Job is “I’m God and you’re not.” Which, at least on the surface, is not terribly helpful. What God says, as powerful and as beautiful as it is, doesn’t directly respond to what Job is asking. God never says anything about “Why?”  

Notice that God doesn’t tell Job  that everything will all turn out all right in the end;    God is making it very clear he is not a transactional God— like a vending machine or an ATM. We don’t put in the right behaviour or say the right prayers and thus are sure to get the result we want. It just doesn’t work that way. .

  What is most important for Job and his questions,  and for us, is not what God said. What is most important is that God spoke to Job. God, who did lay the foundations of the earth, who did shut in the sea with doors, who does comprehend the expanse of the earth—this same God reaches out to Job. God speaks to him   and offers relationship—not answers, not quick fixes, not what Job wants—but relationship.

Again, God is not a God, giving guaranteed results. God is   a God who offers and seeks relationship. That’s enough;   God seeks and offers relationship. That’s what there is; that’s all there is in this story.

Something very similar is going on in the story of Jesus rebuking the wind and storm.   The point here is that Jesus is always in the boat and that he is awake. The promise is not that there will be no storms that the disciples will always be safe. That’s not the way it is, and Mark knew that perfectly well when he told this story.

 But what the disciples and the Church learned early and never forgot was that, wherever they were, and whatever was happening to them, they were not alone. Their Lord was there—he was with them, knowing them and loving them and never letting go.

As with Job and the disciples, what the Lord offers us is relationship—his presence and his love— and not answers, in the middle of whatever we have to face. Like Job, we have caught the ear of the one who laid the cornerstone of earth; like the disciples, we are never alone, no matter what happens to that boat, or to us.

 What God offers is relationship—maybe not often in the form of a voice from a whirlwind, or as a handy miracle that fixes things, but most often in a gentle reminder that we are not alone, and that God is with us and shares our pain.

If we look for that, if we look for the loving presence of God himself, in the very heart of whatever is happening, we will find it. We won’t find answers or exemptions or solutions, but we will find this. It is not always what we want or hope for, but it is there, and it is real, and it is enough.