A Commentary and Reflection on the Readings for the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Year B. The Liturgical Sense of the Scriptures Podcast, by Catholic Author and Theologian David L. Gray. READINGS: Job 38:1, 8-11, 2 Corinthians 5:14-17, Mark 4:35-41.
The Liturgy of the Mass Answers Human Longing and Suffering Through God’s Presence
Every human person is always longing for God. We long for God because He authored and created us, and, thereby, we innately and naturally yearn to know the source of life. Job says it this way, “I will see for myself, my own eyes, not another’s, will behold him: my inmost being is consumed with longing.”[1] Although God created everything, humans uniquely yearn for God because He created us with the capacity to know and the freedom to discover happiness. However, considering nature, we can imagine ourselves as a tree stretching in every direction, even our roots, to find and touch our author. We might imagine ourselves as rushing water, always trying to find our way back to the source. Thereby, in longing for God, we yearn for life, and when we rightly pursue God, we find eternal life in Him, who has been with us all along. The most profound realization in our search for God is that He was always here. However, we choose to ignore Him and decide to be satisfied in searching and finding something less.
Today’s First Reading from Job 38:1, 8-11 is an exciting place to remember that suffering, when the internalization of it does not lead to self-absorption and self-victimizing, can become a wonderful time to contemplate the awe and wonder of God’s mercy and how He is using our suffering to sanctify us. The text says that it was “out of the storm” that God addressed Job, meaning that He spoke through the storm; that is, through – amid the suffering; in and through Job’s suffering, God spoke to Him, meaning that He was there with Job in the storm.
Before God responds in chapter 38, Job’s complaints are a profound expression of his anguish and bewilderment at his suffering despite his righteousness. Job felt that someone like him, who was innocent and righteous, should not have to suffer such depths of loss he had. As such, Job laments the apparent injustice of his situation, where he, an innocent man, suffers while the wicked prosper. Job’s lamentations and pleas are a pot of despair, a longing for understanding from his friends and God, and a yearning to argue his case before God – a case that asks God, ‘How could you?’ Indeed, Job’s complaints are not just a personal outcry of someone who has suffered so much that he curses the day of his birth and laments his misfortune,[2] but also touch on the mystery of how we grow closer to God in our suffering.
Starting here in chapter 38 and through 41, God speaks to Job through the storm – through his suffering, challenging him with questions about the creation and management of the world, which instructs Job that the same author of his life is also the author and master of everything that touches his life and everything that he suffers from having lost. Ultimately, Job realizes how ignorant it was to demand an answer to why he suffered. Instead, he learns that we do not seek an answer to suffering, but we answer suffering with humility.
We answer suffering with humility because no one has suffered more than Christ Jesus on the Cross. As the Apostle Paul writes to the Church at Corinth in today’s Second Reading from 2 Corinthians 5:14-17, “He indeed died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” So, if we live in Christ’s suffering rather than our own, do we not also live in the victory and glory He had over suffering? Indeed, we do according to Saint Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome, writing, “For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.”[3]
My best working definition of suffering is that suffering is what happens when things do not go our way. In other words, when we lose control of outcomes to the degree that those outcomes negatively affect us, we suffer. An outcome could be as simple and ordinary as in today’s Gospel Reading from Mark 4:35-41 when a violent storm unexpectedly overcame the boat the disciples and Jesus were traveling in. The text says, “A violent squall came up, and waves were breaking over the boat so that it was already filling up. Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. They woke him and said, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” The wind ceased, and there was great calm. Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” It is true; what do we have to suffer if God is in our presence? Suppose we are faithful and obedient to God and truly unite with Him. In that case, no outcomes in our lives are greater than Him, and there is no suffering that in our life He is not reconciling to glorify Him. Indeed, there is one man who makes all of his suffering about himself, but there is another man who realizes that Jesus suffered for him first; therefore, he suffers not, but rests in the victory of Christ Jesus.
Having victory over suffering by uniting ourselves with the presence of God is the Divine Symphony of the Mass. Take, for instance, the Mass’s first movement – the penitential rite, where we acknowledge our sins and their resulting suffering; in the liturgy of the word, we place ourselves within salvation history, recognizing the need for a suffering messiah to pay the price for our sins that we could not pay; during the liturgy of the Holy Eucharist, the Savior who liberated us from the agony of sin and death unites His eternal life with ours, which is becoming divine; and finally, in the dismissal, those who were emancipated from sin venture out to guide others towards liberation through Christ. In each movement of the liturgy, the teaching is clear: God, Immanuel, is with you so that your suffering is not for you to endure alone, and it does not have to be your own. For He says, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”[4]
This is just one way how the readings at Mass this Sunday connect to the liturgy and how the liturgy is forming us how to live our lives in the world. Be in the world what you have received through the liturgy.
[1] Job 19:27.
[2] Job 3.
[3] Romans 6:5.
[4] Matthew 28:20.
