Replacing Entitlements with Blessings

All week long the first reading of the Liturgy centered on the story of Job.  Job lost everything: all of his possessions, his sons and daughters and even his own health.  Through all of this, Job maintained his faith, his trust and his respect of God. Never once does he speak disrespectfully of God or abandon God.  His friends confront him, believing that he must have seriously and severely offended God.  “God must be punishing you,” Job’s friends reason with him.  Job does wonder why God is allowing so much evil to happen to him.  Satan, we learn, has challenged God concerning Job, saying: “Of course, he is loyal to you . You have blessed him and protected him from evil. If calamity strikes, he will not remain reverend and faithful.”  So God gives Satan his wish to try Job. Job wins out and God stops Satan from continuing to torture him.

How easy it is when tragedy strikes to believe that the country, the nation , the people, the person or even ourselves as individuals deserve to suffer.  This belief runs through both the Old and New Testament. When Jesus heals the man born blind from birth, for instance, the Pharisees insist that either the man or his parents sinned gravely and deserved this hardship. “Not true,”  says Jesus. The physical impairment, in this case, is an opportunity that will reveal God’s greatness, God’s power, God’s mercy and God’s love, as is the potential within all of the tragedies of this life. Magic does not remove the vicissitudes of life, the difficulties and challenges of being finite human beings. Not even Jesus escaped life’s traumatic, problematic situations nor death itself.

In Job’s case, his response was: “Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I go back again. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”  What if I, when confronted with suffering, hardship, disappointment and of a situation that denies me what I want or what I think is my right, I  would respond with “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” instead of ranting and raving of how unjust life is and how unfair people can be. Maybe, sometimes,  I need to try Job’s way instead of the way of entitlement.