Please read the Scripture passage before the homily.
The book of Genesis starts out telling how God created the universe. God’s spirit hovered over the waters. These waters were a concrete way of describing the nothingness or chaos that “existed” before creation came to be. This God of mountains, seas and land is the God with whom Job is wrestling.
Yes, Job knows the power of this God. This God is like the super-rich lawyers of the super-rich who have hauled in court the people like Job and us who have little or no resources against the powerful. What hope can Job have of any success? In the courtroom of Job’s case against God, Job is like a fly in a room full of flyswatters.
We are like Job in thinking the universe revolves us. The sun and moon do not rise and set. Rather the moon spins around the earth and the earth revolves around the sun. Our solar system, then moves along with the many other solar system in the universe. Our life depends on God, whereas God’s life does not depend on us.
We are like the fruit trees and the flowers that the farmer or gardener prunes and trims back so that the plants bear more fruit, stronger and hardier, for the harvest. Other than this we cannot say. The mystery of our lives is bound together in the mysterious tension between suffering and relaxation. In this process we grow to become the perfected human completely re-formed into the image and likeness of God in which we were originally made.