
MISFORTUNE
and what we should
learn from the trials of Job
“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return
thither:
the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: as it hath pleased
the Lord so is it done:
blessed be the name of the Lord. In all these things Job sinned
not by his lips,
nor spoke he any foolish thing against God.”
(Job 1.21-22)
Job
lost everything
Everything:
children, house,
health, good name, property ... you name it, and Job lost it.
Covered with boils from “the sole of his foot to the crown of
his head,” he sat upon the ashes he poured over his head and
scraped himself with a potsherd. Even his wife reviled him:
“Curse God and die.” Three friends came, barely recognizing Job,
and sat a week with him in silence. They then proceeded to
“console” Job ... by convicting him of his sins ... sins he
never committed.
Finally, Job himself uttered what we all have uttered at one
time or another in our lives:
“Why did I not die at birth, come
forth from the womb and expire?”
In other words, would that his
nakedness had never been clothed in honor and glory — for
then he would not know the pain of losing what he never
had.
But God had,
“... made a fence for him, and his house, and all his substance
round about, blessed the works of his hands, and his possession
hath increased on the earth?”
(Job 1.10)
God prospered Job.
The evil one, knowing this, tore
down the hedge, devastated Job’s house, and tempted Job to
despair ... to give up on God.
And yet ... incredibly, “in all these things Job sinned not.”
Job was blameless before God.
We know
Job
We have
been
Job ... in one form or
another at some point, perhaps at many points, in our lives. We
have been devastated, deprived of what we esteemed good, lost
our health, our jobs, our dignity, security ... and, for great
sorrow, even our families.
How do we console ourselves? Most often, as Job’s friends had
consoled him, we tell ourselves that our misfortune is, in some
incomprehensible sense, just ... that we are
suffering the rigors of an exacting and ineluctable justice that
we had somehow eluded for sins or crimes we no longer remember
... from which we had inexplicably managed to escape, and which
have finally caught up with us and demanded tribute.
However, the fact of the matter is that — at least in the case
of Job — Job’s misfortunes were not just. There was no
proportion between what he suffered and what he had done —
indeed, Job had done nothing but good! Job’s misfortunes, we
find, were not God’s “payback.”
And neither are ours.
Even were justice demanded
of us for our sins — and unlike Job, our own sins are many — we
can never make adequate restitution, never pay
reparation, for we are too poor. We had squandered that
patrimony of grace which had been given our First Parents in
justice, and we forfeited it just as they did — even after
Baptism washed us of that Original Sin, that primal effrontery
through which our patrimony became our poverty!
Only what is without sin
can cancel sin. And that justice has already been rendered
— through Jesus Christ on the Cross.
Yes, God is just. But it was not Job — and it is not us —
it is God Himself who paid the price of justice in
the shattered humanity of Christ.
Rendering Justice to God
God did not – and He does
not – exact the restitution of justice from
us. We do not possess the tribute, the wherewithal —
and we are fools, or deceived, if we believe that we
can render justice to God. Only God can render justice to
God. Why? Because the plenitude of justice that is
God and that is due God is infinite because God
Himself is infinite. His justice — like His love,
goodness, and mercy — is the perpetual act of His
being: it is, as it were, the very fabric of His Being:
a “Being-good,” a “Being-loving,” a
“Being-merciful” ... and a “Being-just”.
Love, mercy, goodness, justice are
not merely “parts” of God's Being — rather, His being
is a “Being-good,” “Being-loving,” “Being-merciful”
... and “Being-just.” These infinite and eternal
acts (the acts of being: a-being-loving,
a-being-good, a-being-just) do not simply coincide with
His Being as something extraneous to it — they constitute
His Being! To sin against justice, then, is to sin
against the infinite justice of God Who alone is a
Being-just ... and note merely a “just” being. How,
then, can finite man make infinite restitution?
We cannot. Only Christ, being God, could — on the Cross. That is
why Jesus is called, “the Just One.”
*
So, what of Job? What of us?
We came into this world with
nothing. We will leave it with nothing. We think that we have
worked for, earned, all the good things we enjoy, and
reckon the day they may be taken from us injustice, not
understanding that injustice was never done us, for we
never merited, deserved, any of these things.
What, then, of all our hard work and sweat?
Ask yourself from the depths of the truthfulness of your being:
have you worked harder, more diligently,
more desperately, more deservingly, than the
poverty stricken farmer in sub-Sahara Africa? Why is he
not adorned as you? Why is his plate empty? Because
you are “more just” and these things are “more justly”
yours (your “due” in justice?) — but somehow not his?
If you possess power, wealth, esteem, glory, in this world, do
not congratulate yourself on your diligence, your “uncanny”
insight, your “good luck” and success. Given the blandishment of
the evil one — the “father of lies” — which we find in the
temptation of Christ, it is, I suggest, far more appropriate
to tremble.
Behold Job. And also behold Christ — Christ Who was also
tempted by that same evil one who, in his empty promise, is
frightfully revealing:
“And the devil led Him into a high mountain, and showed Him all
the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and he said to
Him:
To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of
them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I
will, I give them.”
(Saint Luke 4.5-6)
Ask yourself soberly: whence
your prosperity, your power, your wealth? From whom,
and to what end? And at the cost of whose dignity and through
the poverty of how many did you acquire it? Prosperity, many
Protestants hold, is a sign of God’s favor, a
token of His predilection: if you are “just” and “Godly,” God
will prosper you.
Misfortune and suffering, then, are — much in line
with the reasoning of Job’s “consolers” — afflictions from
God. They are the penalty — meted out by God —
for “injustice” and “ungodliness.” Material prosperity, on the
other hand, together with wealth and power — these are God’s
blessings for the “just.” It is, in a word, their “reward” ...
their “due” in all justice.
But it was not Saint Paul’s ...
nor the “reward” due in “justice” to the other Apostles:
“Even unto this hour we both hunger and thirst, and are naked,
and are buffeted, and have no fixed abode;
And we labour, working with our own hands: we are reviled, and
we bless; we are persecuted, and we suffer it.
We are blasphemed, and we entreat; we are made as the refuse of
this world, the offscouring of all even until now”
(1 Cor. 4.10-13)
This was the insidious trap set
for Job by the devil through his “consolers” ... and by our own
self-recrimination in the face of misfortune. We
are confronted with misfortune. Who is to blame? With incredible
subtlety, the devils suggests that either we
are guilty — or God is! If we are not
guilty for this misfortune, then God is. If God
is not, then we are.
But neither is the case!
In other words, Job brought it
unknowingly upon himself — and God (not the devil,
mind you ...) was perfectly willing to be complicit in this
injustice —by punishing Job for what he did not do! What
is more, He punished Job by “unjustly” taking away “what was
his.” It was a masterpiece of illusion! Diabolically
brilliant! Job was tempted by the devil to despair in
having “unjustly” lost all that was “not his
in justice” to begin with!
In a supreme irony, Christ was
tempted by the same devil to idolatry through an empty promise
to give Him what was already His to begin with.
Remember, who precisely was it who had said that
wealth, material prosperity, and power
was his to give? And who was it that
took it away from Job – that was his to give
and his to take?
Misfortunes are not from God. Nor are they the
penalty of your sins, for you would then have nothing (given
your countless sins and the justice that would be exacted for
each.)
Misfortunes, suffering, want, pain, destitution, illness, are
not lofty, if cruel, tributes to justice! They are evils! Evils
out of which God ever brings good ... as He did with Job
who, “in all these things ... sinned not.”
Misfortune is not of your own
making — still less is it from God. Saint Paul understood this.
You must also:
“For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against
principalities and power, against the rulers of the world
of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high
places. Therefore take unto you the armor of God,
that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in
all things perfect.” (Ephesians
6.12)
Let us see misfortune for what it
is — and not for what the “father of lies” would entice us to
believe. Evil is from the “evil one,”
endlessly contending with the ever-redemptive love of God
lifting us up from the squalor of misery through the arduous
path to holiness, calling us from that relentless malice that
would pull us down to despair.
_____________________________________________________
*
Acts 7.52
Geoffrey K.
Mondello
Editor
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
Boston Catholic Journal
www.boston.catholic.journal.com
May 26, 2025,
Feast of Saint Philip Neri
Printable PDF Version

Totally Faithful to the Sacred
Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Holy See in
Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti
verbum Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power,
and yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My
Name.”
(Apocalypse 3.8)
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