How often do we question the Lord’s wisdom? When the innocent man Job is at the end of his rope, having lost almost everyone he loves and nearly all he owns, Job begins to question God’s wisdom. Speaking out of the storm, God responds to Job’s challenges with his own spectacularly vivid questions: Who shut within doors the sea, when it burst forth from the womb; when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling bands? It is as much as if to say, I set order over chaos and created more than you can imagine; how dare you second guess my work? The Lord God is the source of mysteries we cannot understand, and wants us to see him at work and marvel at it, without imposing our own limited parameters on him. God is exploding all Job presumes to know because God doesn’t want Job to live within the limitations of his own way of thinking. If Job can stretch beyond those limitations, he will have a more accurate (albeit still incomplete) understanding of God, whose love, as Psalm 107 tells us, is everlasting. But first, Job needs to open his vision to see that love in all of God’s activity.
Jesus’ disciples will have similar difficulty opening their vision to see what Jesus is truly capable of. In Mark’s Gospel, when the disciples take Jesus into their boat just as he was, he falls asleep on a cushion, where he will remain even when a violent squall comes up and waves are breaking over the boat. Such a tempest terrifies the disciples, who still do not seem to trust that Jesus is capable of calming any storm without even leaving his seat. Faith is not speaking to their hearts; faith has no access to their hearts. They, too, need to open their vision to see Jesus, not just as they initially believe him to be, but as a divine force among them, with gifts they cannot begin to imagine.
We who are baptized, and who have thus become a new creation, Paul tells the Corinthians, must be similarly open. We are not what we were before; we are more, for God sent his Son to die for all, to broaden our vision. Our baptism impels us to take up our life for others, allowing Christ’s love to change us, expanding our perspective. Now one with him, we must recognize that God’s vision is so much bigger than anything we could possibly understand… and yet, so long as we embrace the mystery and trust in the God who saves, we will know that we can get through any difficulty, for God’s love never fails.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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