A homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Feb. 7, 2021
Jb 7:1-4, 6-7, 1 Cor 9:16-19, 22-23, Mk 1:29-39
The cliché tells of the patience of Job, but today’s first reading sounds more like the whining of Eeyore, the tail-less donkey friend of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery? …
So I have been assigned months of misery,
and troubled nights have been allotted to me.
There’s heavy, and there’s soul-crushing. Then there’s this passage.
So much darkness, so much despair from a man of God. Job was looking for figurative bottomless pits, looking in, and declaring that they weren’t deep enough.
His life was a nonstop personal typhoon, earthquake and meteor shower all wrapped up in one.
But in the end, this man of God persisted. He did indeed have his legendary patience.
He also had faith and hope. Faith: a belief that God had a plan for him and that it was all for the best. Hope for a brighter day to come, even when he was unsure of when it would arrive or what it would bring.
Yes, even when his misery was intense and even when it seemed as if that misery would never end, Job hung in there.
Sound familiar?
We only need to look around our homes and jobs to see ourselves and family and friends and total strangers pictured on the TV news to know we’ve been assigned a Job-heavy misery because of the pandemic.
I shall not see happiness again.
Sound familiar??
If ever a week’s Scriptures were to hit home with this kind of impact, these do.
And even though we are people of God like Job, we can be excused if we do the Eeyore thing, too.
It’s been a year and almost 500,000 of our brothers and sisters have gone home to God from America alone, with almost five times that number worldwide, as far as we know.
We have a hard time convincing ourselves that we shall see happiness again, vaccine and masks and distancing notwithstanding.
So, yes, we’re in the same boat as Job.
So how about cranking up some of his patience?
Because we have that, and something extra that Job didn’t have:
We have the healing and salvation that Jesus provides.
This week, and every week over the last year, we could hear the bleatings of Job and leave it there.
We, however, have The Good News. We have The Light. We have The Word Made Flesh who preached and healed and drove out demons, and who challenges us to do the same in his name.
Our Gospel counters the reading from the Book of Job. Our Gospel turns our faces to the sun and away from the darkest shadows of endless night.
Through our embrace of the Gospel and all it calls us to think, believe and do, we can share in the faith and hope that lifted Job and sustained his patience while we wait for a New Normal.
We can share our insights and our love and our unity to help lift all of God’s children out of the bottomless pit of COVID, knowing that the hands lifting us are the hands with the nail marks left by Roman executioners.
