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Saturday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Ordinary Time
Job 42:1–3, 5–6, 12–17
Today we finish our journey with the Book of Job.
The accuser has lost.
Job suffered deeply.
He lost almost everything.
He questioned.
He cried out.
He did not understand.
But he did not curse God.
He did not stop turning toward Him.
At the end, Job says something very important:
I had heard of You by word of mouth,
but now my eye has seen You.
This is the passage from hearing about God
to encountering God.
Many of us know God by word of mouth.
We have heard the Gospel.
We have heard about the birth of Christ,
His teaching,
His miracles,
His death on the cross,
His resurrection,
and His ascension into heaven.
We believe.
But sometimes, deep inside,
we long for more.
We long not only to hear about God,
but to encounter Him.
Job desired such an encounter.
And when it came, it changed him.
God did not explain everything.
He did not give Job a complete answer to the mystery of suffering.
But Job encountered the living God.
And that was enough to silence him.
He says:
I repent in dust and ashes.
This does not mean that Job’s suffering was his fault.
It means that in the presence of God,
Job sees himself differently.
He is no longer at the center.
God is.
Something similar happened to Saint Teresa of Avila.
She had lived many years in the convent.
She followed the rules.
She lived a religious life.
But Christ was not yet the true center of her heart.
Then, at the age of thirty-nine,
while passing before an image of the suffering Christ,
she experienced a deep conversion.
A lukewarm Teresa died.
Teresa of Jesus was born.
This is what happens when a person truly encounters God.
The old self begins to die.
A new life begins.
Job is changed.
He stops arguing.
He stops defending himself.
He prays for his friends.
And after that, the Lord blesses the latter days of Job more than the first.
This ending does not erase his pain.
It does not bring back all that was lost in the same way.
But it tells us that suffering is not the last word.
God is.
Saint Paul says:
The sufferings of this present time
are not worth comparing
with the glory to be revealed.
So today we can ask:
Do I only hear about God?
Or do I desire to encounter Him?
Can I stop placing myself at the center?
Can I pray even for those who wounded me?
Job teaches us:
the story does not end in ashes.
It ends in encounter,
prayer,
and blessing.
Biblical Reflections on the Gospel of Matthew
Scripture Attribution
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition,
copyright © 1989, 1993
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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© 2025 Krakus.
Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
(Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial).