Why

We are Job.

He, like most of us talk at God. We like Job, question God. We come to God, with a very human trait of feeling we can do a better job of it.

Job wants answers to big questions and like all of us, prefers answers that we want to hear. We want a God who conforms to our understanding and meets out needs.

We want a God with a small g

But, God is more, much more. More than any human concept or description. Even beyond our imagination.

God is simply a divine mystery and we, as living human beings, are called into being and embraced by and finally return to this mystery of God.

 And all we can do is surrender to it. But, we do not surrender to an abstraction.

 Because even as God is beyond and unknowable he draws near to us, breaks into the world in surprising ways; as truth, and life, as light and love. We know this because his son Jesus, by his life, death and resurrection is proof of this love and, of course, we still live with the nearness of God in the gift of the Holy Spirit.

 The mystery which is God is what Job wrestles with, trying to come to grips with the WHY of life.

Why joy and suffering, why life and death, why good and evil.

Job try's to reason this out, as if this were a court of law, a debate on equal terms, why does God act as he does. He says I am accountable for my actions and God needs to be accountable, to me, for his.

Of course, Job has done the talking, but now he listens.

 God, out of a storm, a sign of all that is beyond human control, reminds Job that even though human beings feel in control, in fact need to feel in control, we are not.

We bring our material wealth, technology, and science to bear on the questions of life as if the mystery of God, were a solvable problem.

 God is a mystery, not to be solved but to trusted in.

The question is not Why? But HOW.

How can we respond to God's gracious creating and sustaining power that is love and WHAT must we do to proceed on the path to holiness.

 St Paul gives us a clue.

He tells us in surrendering to the saving love of Christ (who is God with us) we are made new. He says

"So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away, behold new things have come."

We through Jesus Christ become new creations; fully human, open to God working in us and through us and responding in trust, praise and thanksgiving to all of Gods works in the world, seen and unseen. Works we call good even those we might call not so good!

Old things passing away is the passing away of anxiety and fear, the ceaseless asking why? 

Old things passing away is the passing away of demanding or bargaining with God.

New things is the new life of trusting God to be God (always good and always faithful)

We, as new creations in Christ, can now make choices based on trust, gratitude and love, not desire, fear and ignorance. 

As new creations we are not driven to ask why, but always to ask how?

 On that day (a turn of phrase that always means something important is happening) Jesus tells his disciples

"Let us cross to the other side"

A doubling meaning; let us expand the reach of Good News to the Gentiles and let us cross over to a new understanding about who I am.

 They set off across the Sea of Galilee and in the night passage. As Jesus slept ( at peace with all that is or would be), the disciples, feeling alone, encounter a great storm; dark, dreadful, all chaos and noise.

In their anxiety and fear the disciples are certainly not open the mystery of God in the raging seas.

I imagine they argued a bit - you wake him, no you wake him, but wake him they did.

"Teacher, do you not care we are perishing?"

Jesus wakes up and he immediately gets the picture, he understands their fear and

in an action that only God could pull off - he stills the storm with a word.

"Quit, be still"

Here is the mystery of a God at work. Jesus doing what only God can do - the great storm (nature itself) bows to the one who created and sustains the universe and all that it contains.

 In the moon lite new stillness, Jesus asks the disciples why were they afraid, where is their faith?

Faith to accept the storm, as it was, and to ride it out with resolve and skill, both gifts from a loving and faithful God.  Why fear what you cannot control when you can trust in he who can?

Job and the disciples learn (what we all must learn) that regardless of all that life, both nature and human nature can throw at us we are never alone even in the midst of the greatest of storms.

God is always present and powerful in ways beyond our knowing and understanding.

Our response to life is always Jesus; the who, the what and the how to the eternal why.