The Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time [B]
Job 38:1,8-11   +   2 Corinthians 5:14-17   +   Mark 4:35-41

The Book of Job is 42 chapters long, and today’s First Reading is from Chapter 38, so it’s clearly part of the end of the story of Job.  Nonetheless, to reflect meaningfully upon the First Reading, and to contrast it with today’s Gospel Reading, you have to know the entire story of Job.

 In Western culture, you’ll hear the phrase “the patience of Job”.  Some might think the chief point of the Book of Job to be his example of patience.

Certainly Job had many reasons not to be patient.  At the start of the Book of Job, the devil strikes Job by having his livestock raided and killed, and all of his children killed.  The devil is trying to get Job to curse God because of his suffering, but Job refuses to do so.  Then the devil strikes Job with boils from his feet to his head.  Job still will not curse God, though he does question why he was ever born.

Job has three friends who try to console him by trying to convince him that his suffering is a punishment for Job’s wrongdoing.  But Job rejects his friends’ claims.  Instead, he challenges God to explain the reason for his suffering.

That’s where today’s First Reading is set.  The passage only offers four verses of God speaking to Job “out of the storm”.  Did you notice that phrase in today’s First Reading, and how it connects to today’s Gospel Reading, where Jesus sleeps in the boat in the middle of a storm?

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Before reflecting specifically on the First Reading and Gospel passage, stop to consider two different ways to reflect upon Scripture in general.

The first way to reflect upon Scripture is to apply the scriptures to your own life.  Maybe that’s easy where today’s scriptures are concerned, because maybe your life—right now—resembles a storm or even a whirlwind.

But what if your life right now is very peaceful?  What if this current year of your life on earth is one of the best years you’ve ever had:  no illness, no money problems, and no problems with work?  In that case, how do you listen to today’s scriptures?  Or do you just ignore them?

If a given day’s Scriptures don’t seem to “apply” to your life today, they might describe your life at sometime in the past, or in the future.  If they describe your life in the past, then reflecting on the day’s Scriptures might help you deal with past difficulties that are still unresolved or unaccepted.  After all, your past can bear a great weight upon your present self.

On the other hand, since you don’t know today whether in your future you will face what’s described in the day’s Scriptures, it’s good to reflect upon them to prepare yourself for something that might well be coming down the pike.

The second way to reflect upon Scripture is for the sake of another person:  someone around you.  While you might well be having one of the best years of your life, someone around you might be having the worst.  Maybe you have a clearer frame of mind, and can help that someone see things more clearly.  We can do this in part by taking the scriptures, reflecting upon them, and relating them to what that someone is dealing with.

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So given all that, consider today’s First Reading and Gospel Reading.

Out of the whirlwind, God responds to Job’s question about suffering.  God responds, but He does not answer Job’s question in the way that Job was hoping.  God does not explain where suffering comes from, or even if there’s a deeper meaning to it.

God’s response to Job is much like Jesus’ response to the disciples in the boat.  The disciples’ cry is perfectly understandable.  Their cry is like the prayers that you and I might offer when we’re in distress.  “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  The disciples’ cry is perfectly natural.  Yet how does Jesus respond?  His response is not perfectly natural.  It’s perfectly supernatural.  Jesus calls us to be more like Him, and less like our own fearful selves.

Jesus calls us to rest in Him, even in the midst of suffering and distress.  That’s the first point, but not the key point.  The key point is that Jesus is with us—present—in the midst of our suffering and distress.

Two of the four evangelists stress this point when they start their Gospel accounts.  St. Matthew, in the first chapter of his Gospel account, speaks about the birth of Jesus by quoting the prophet Isaiah:  “‘Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means ‘God is with us’” [Mt 1:23].  St. John, in the first chapter of his Gospel account, speaks about God the Son becoming man in this way:  “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth”; “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” [Jn 1:14,12].

God is with us.  He’s in the boat beaten by the waves.  First, He’s with us to help us make the changes needed amidst the suffering that we’ve inflicted upon ourselves.  Second, He’s also with us to help bear the suffering imposed upon us by others, and to pursue justice when that’s needed.  Third, He’s with us against the suffering that arises from natural causes in this world that’s full of sickness and storms.  He’s with us in all things, and wants to strengthen us in the midst of our suffering.

We are the children of God.  Yet that truth does not exempt us from suffering.  After all, how did the life of Jesus, the Father’s only-begotten Son, end if not in the suffering of His Passion and Crucifixion?  God’s love does not exempt us from suffering, but it does assure us of His Presence in its midst.

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references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church cited for this Sunday by the Vatican’s Homiletic Directory:

CCC 423, 464-469: Jesus, true God and true Man
CCC 1814-1816: faith as gift of God, and human response
CCC 671-672: maintaining faith in adversity

The Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time [B]
Ezekiel 17:22-24  +  2 Corinthians 5:6-10  +  Mark 4:26-34

Most Christians would say that Christians are supposed to carry out the will of God. Whatever God wants in any given situation is what the Christian disciple ought to do, and when the Christian does carry out the will of God, that disciple grows to be more like God by virtue of carrying out that action.

However, here’s an important question. To what extent does God take an interest in what we do? Is God just interested in the general outline of our lives, or is He a micro-manager? Does God only care about each of us finding our vocation in life, and then leave the rest to us, or does He have a check-list for us each morning, which we need to complete by nightfall? How a Christian answers that question has a lot to do with his or her potential for spiritual growth.

Regarding God’s will, and how the Christian is meant to carry it out, one of the monkey wrenches that often gets thrown into Christians’ minds is the idea that if we simply lead a basically decent life, we will—in any given situation—understand what is good and what is bad when choices are set before us.

Unfortunately, this is false. The world, and the moral choices that we have to make in this world, are not that simple. From the beginning, from the example of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis, we see that the Devil is more devious than we give him credit for.

The fact is that the willpower of fallen man is weak. The willpower of fallen man is “damaged goods”, so to speak. The human will of each of us was deformed by Original Sin. Even though Baptism restores grace to our souls, Baptism does not make the human soul as strong as it was “in the beginning”, before sin entered our world.

Given all this, the Christian has at least three different ways to think about Christian morality. These are three different ways of considering what a Christian is and is not to do in this world.

The first way of thinking about Christian morality is to think that the goal of Christian morality is to avoid sin, especially mortal sin. This is based on the distinction between good and evil, which is the foundation of Christian morality. However, while this first way of thinking about Christian morality is the foundation, we have to build upon the foundation. That’s where the second way comes in.

The second way of thinking about Christian morality is to think that the goal of Christian morality is to do as much good as possible. While the first way of thinking focuses on avoiding sin, the second focuses on doing good. Yet by itself, this second way is incomplete. If our lives as Christians were only about doing good, then it would be enough to choose simply what is “more or less” good, as long as it’s not evil. But that’s not the final goal of the Christian moral life.

In other words, God intends that you yourself, in any given situation, would choose the most loving choice: not just avoiding evil choices, and not just choosing any of several good choices, but instead, choosing the best choice—the most loving choice—among many possible good choices. This distinction—this third way of thinking about Christian morality—is what makes the difference between a lukewarm Catholic and a living saint.

God intends something particular for each of us in every action of every day of our lives, and if we are not sacrificing what is necessary to make those choices, we are not living up to our baptismal promises.

Now we have to be honest: some Christians might find this truth overwhelming. They might ask: “How can a Christian constantly be focused upon figuring out what God’s will is, much less calling upon the inner strength to carry it out?”

The simple answer is that the further away you are from God, the harder it is. Yet the closer you draw to God, the easier it becomes. Not only does it become easier: it becomes “second nature”. Consider a simple analogy from ordinary life.

Maybe when you were a teenager, you learned to drive in a vehicle with an automatic transmission. My parents wanted my sisters and brother and me to first learn how to drive a vehicle by driving a stick-shift. Of course, this made the learning process much more challenging. During my first efforts on the dirt roads west of town, as much as I wanted to be able to drive, more than once I wanted to give up because of the difficulty in coordinating everything, especially the clutch, the gear shift, and the foot feed. Of course, after a person spends many years driving, coordinating all the tasks involved becomes second-nature. You don’t even have to coordinate them consciously, so easily can you do them at the same time.

Something similar is true of the Catholic moral life. The more often we make good and strong moral and spiritual choices, the easier it becomes.

Of course, we cannot act in a Christ-like manner through human will power alone. We have to allow God to strengthen our will by means of His grace. We do this by leading a sacramental life. Most blessed among the seven sacraments, of course, is the Eucharist, and the way in which we prepare ourselves to devoutly receive this sacrament says a lot about our dedication to the Christian moral life and sacramental life.

Another part of the moral life to consider is how much of a role penance plays in our life. Now when I say the word “penance”, the first thing that comes to your mind might be the Sacrament of Penance: that is, Confession. For others, the first thing they think of when they hear the word “penance” is those actions that they carry out (or give up) during the season of Lent: that is, acts of self-denial.

Both the Sacrament of Penance and our own personal acts of penance are ways to strengthen our weak human wills: to restore those damaged goods to their proper shape. God’s grace in Confession, of course, is far more powerful than our personal acts of self-sacrifice. But God never treats us like a puppet. He always wills that each of us should share with Him in the work of our spiritual growth, even if we are only spiritual infants, and He is our divine Father.

We could spend all our days in prayer discerning God’s will for our lives, but once we found out God’s Will, what good would that knowledge do if we weren’t strong enough to carry it out? By ourselves, we are like the tiny mustard seed. But by means of our simple acts of self-sacrifice, and the powerful grace of God’s sacraments, God can providentially—in His own good time, we know not how—bear an abundant spiritual harvest within our souls.

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references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church cited for this Sunday by the Vatican’s Homiletic Directory:

CCC 543-546: announcing the Kingdom of God
CCC 2653-2654, 2660, 2716: the Kingdom grows by hearing the Word