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02 February 2024
Job and Therese
Job was a just man…a good man, a man of God.
And through no fault of his own, his life begins to fall apart. He loses everything he owns, his children become sick and finally he is beset with a grave illness.
He probably thought he would find a sympathetic ear when his friends show up. But each one of them essentially tell him it must be his own fault. ‘What did you do to make God so angry that he did all this awful stuff to you?’
But Job, good man that he is, knows that it’s not his fault. Plus, that’s not how God works. He does not always punish the bad and reward the good in this life. It’s not all the good people who win the megabucks and the bad people get cancer.
Sure, there are certain things we can do to dig the hole we find ourselves in. If I smoke, I shouldn’t be surprised by the heart disease or lung cancer. If I do 120 on Route 2 East, I shouldn’t be surprised by the accident. Or if I rob a bank, I shouldn’t be surprised if I get to stay the night in the Leominster Police Station.
But for most of the bad things that happen to us, there is often no rhyme or reason…neither God nor man can be seen as the instrumental cause.
Which is why Job challenges his friends. My suffering, he tells them, is not the result of my sin. He knows that he is innocent, But the question remains, why is he suffering?
His suffering, like most, is a mystery.
Indeed, it is the paschal mystery, whereon the innocent Lamb was nailed to a Cross for our salvation. Thus, the “why?” of suffering is always joined, inextricably, to the Cross, the story of Divine Love, which is our salvation.
Saint Therese of Liseux understood this mystery well. She did not yell at God and demand to know why bad things happen to her. Rather, she saw suffering as a gift from God.
A gift from God?! How can suffering be a gift?!
Three months before her death, as her body was breaking down, and each of the medical treatments seemed to make her feel more miserable, Saint Therese wrote to her sister that “suffering has become my heaven here below.”
“If God increases my sufferings,” she writes, “I will bear them with pleasure and with joy because they will be coming from him.” Her only desire was to do the will of God, which included joining her life to the Cross of Jesus and to his Passion.
She goes on:
"For a long time I have not belonged to myself since I delivered myself totally to Jesus, and he is therefore free to do with me as he pleases…he made me understand that my letting go alone was pleasing to him…I shall sing even when I must gather my flowers in the midst of thorns”
Saint Therese is a lot like Job, who says bluntly to his friends that it is all the Lord’s:
“Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb,
and naked shall I go back there.
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away;
blessed be the name of the LORD!”
