Job 38:1-11
II Corinthians 6:1-13
Mark 4:35-41

Job is one of the most famous persons from the Bible, mostly because of the phrase: “the patience of Job.” However, if one reads the Book of Job, one sees that he is not patient at all. Job wants God to answer him and explain why God has allowed Job to suffer so much after being so righteous. It is Job’s friends who might be considered as being patient – they sit around and talk about God and explain to Job why he should calmly accept what is happening to him. After many pages of complaints by Job and scoldings by his friends, God finally joins the conversation by telling Job that God is the boss and does not need to answer any of Job’s complaints. However, God goes on the say that it is Job’s friends who are wrong, not Job.

On the surface, that does not make sense – if God is the boss and does not need to answer to us, then aren’t Job’s friends right for telling Job to accept what has happened, and isn’t Job wrong for complaining? Maybe God is more concerned with how the characters are dealing with the situation than with their words. While Job’s friends are talking about God, Job is actually talking to God. And even more importantly to a person in a monastic setting, Job spends a lot of time listening to God – the first part of which we heard in our first reading this morning.

So maybe the answer to all our questions about God and the universe are answered not by solutions, but by relationship. God does not solve all our problems the way we want or tell God to. Instead, God goes through our problems with us  – by being in relationship with us and also even more concretely by being one of us, and experiencing human life first hand as Jesus of Nazareth. We can talk about God all we want (there is nothing wrong with that – theology can be very helpful), but talking with God is where we grow into our full personhood. And we must remember that it is usually good to let God do most of the talking, although it is true that sometimes God uses our own words and thoughts to show us the answers – as William of St. Thierry says: “Let your question be your prayer.”

Maybe Job’s words do not seem patient, but in the long run, his approach does take more patience than his friends’. Anyone can claim to have all the answers about God and in a comparatively short time write books containing all those answers. Anyone can read all those books in a comparatively short time and claim to have learned all the answers. But listening and talking to God with no expectation of any answers takes a lifetime. In fact, it takes more than a lifetime, because lifetimes are finite and God is infinite. So, the way of Job – the way of relationship with God is slow, and often seemingly useless, but it is really the only way to the real answers in life.

Although “patience” may or may not be a good way to describe Job, we should strive to be patient. Even more than “patient”, we should strive to be “constant”, because “patience” often implies that we are waiting for things to get better, while “constancy” implies that it does not matter whether or not things get better – we will abide in God and trust God with our lives no matter how good or bad things get. Paul talks about constancy in our second reading this morning, and like the disciples in our gospel story this morning, we need to remember that Jesus is in the same boat with us. He may or may not do what we want him to do, but he will always do what we really need him to do (even when we do not perceive it that way).
We don’t and can’t know the whole story of life and the future and the universe and why things are the way they are. But we can talk about it and try to figure it out, like Job’s friends, and we can also do even better and (like Job) talk and listen to God, even though the answer is beyond us. Out of the whirlwind God answered Job. May we, with patience and constancy, listen to God, even if confronted with a whirlwind.  AMEN