Homily | October 3, 2026 | When God Does Not Explain (Episode 293)

Well, we've arrived at the end of this week, and today's Saturday, and all week long we've been listening to Job.

Today we finally reached the end.

After all the suffering, after all the questions, after all the arguments, after Job loses his possessions, his health, his children, after his friends try to explain why it happened, after Job demands answers from God, God finally speaks.

And here's the surprising part.

God never answers Job's question.

Think about that.

Job has spent chapter after chapter asking why, why God?

Why did this happen?

Why did you allow this?

Why my suffering?

And when God finally speaks, he never gives Job the explanation he wanted.

Instead, God gives Job something else himself.

And Job says, I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you.

That may be the key to the entire book of Job.

At the beginning Job knew about God.

At the end Job has encountered God.

There's an enormous difference between the two.

You can know things about God.

You can study theology, you can know scripture, you can know the catechism, you can know all the right answers.

And then one day your life falls apart.

The diagnosis comes, someone dies, a relationship ends, a prayer goes unanswered, something happens to your child, a dream you carried for years disappears, and suddenly all the things you knew about God are tested by the experience of actually needing God.

That is Job.

He moves from I know about God to I have encountered God.

And strangely, after that encounter, Job no longer needs the explanation he thought he needed.

That does not mean his questions were wrong.

God never condemns Job simply for asking questions.

Job cries out, Job argues, Job complains, Job even challenges God.

The Bible does not sanitize his grief, and I love that.

Because sometimes Christians think faith means never asking why.

It doesn't.

Sometimes why is the most honest prayer you have left.

Jesus himself prayed from the cross.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The problem is not asking God questions.

The danger comes when we decide that unless God answers our questions to our satisfaction, we will no longer trust him.

And Job finally discovers something that every mature believer eventually has to discover.

There are questions in this life that may never receive an answer.

Why did that person die so young?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Why did that marriage collapse?

Why did that child suffer?

Why did the cancer come back?

Why did God not answer the prayer that we begged him to?

Why this?

Why that?

Why me?

Sometimes there's no answer that will make the pain make sense.

And perhaps that is the and that's because there are moments when what the human heart needs most is not an explanation.

It needs a presence.

Think about that when somebody you love is grieving.

You can walk into the room and explain suffering to them, or you can sit right next to them.

Most of the time they don't need your theology lecture.

They just need you.

Maybe Job discovers something similar.

Most of the book he wants God to explain himself.

By the end, God has not explained himself.

God has revealed himself, and Job says that is enough.

I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you.

And then there's another lesson here.

Job's friends thought they understood everything.

They had an explanation for suffering.

Good people prosper, bad people suffer.

Therefore, Job, if you're suffering, you must have done something wrong, simple, clean, religious, but completely wrong.

The book of Job describes that kind destroys that kind of theology.

Not every suffering is punishment.

Not every tragedy can be explained.

Not every person who suffers brought it upon themselves.

Some terrible things happen to good people, and faith does not require us to invent an explanation in order to protect God.

Sometimes the most faithful words we can say is I don't know.

I don't know why this happened.

I don't know why God allowed it.

I don't know why my prayer hasn't been answered.

But I do know God.

And that's the difference.

Then we arrive at this strange ending.

Job's fortunes are restored.

He receives livestock again, he has children again.

He lives to see grandchildren and great grandchildren.

But we have to be careful here.

The message is not be faithful and eventually God will make you rich.

And those new children do not replace the children Job lost.

Human beings are not replaceable.

Job will always be a man who buried his children.

His restoration does not erase his suffering.

It reveals that suffering does not have the final word.

And that's a big difference.

Job's life was shattered, but his life was not over.

And somebody listening today may need to hear exactly that.

What happened to you matters.

What you lost matters.

The wound you're carrying matters.

The betrayal matters.

The grave matters.

Christianity never asks us to pretend otherwise.

But the wound does not have to become your entire identity.

The worst thing happening to you does not get to write the ending of your story.

God does.

And that's what Job discovers.

Not that everything lost will be returned exactly as it was, not that every question will be answered, not that faithful people will be protected from suffering.

Job discovers something deeper.

God can still create a future after the life you planned has disappeared.

Maybe that's what Job can teach us after thousands of years.

The beginning of the book, Job loses almost everything.

By the end he still does not understand everything, but now he knows God differently.

I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you.

Maybe that's where faith ultimately has to take us.

There comes a point when God the God we have heard about has to become the God we encounter.

Not merely the God our parents told us about, not merely the God we learned about in Catholic school, not merely the God we hear about from the pulpit, the God we ourselves have met.

And strangely enough, sometimes that encounter happens precisely in the place we would never have chosen.

In the hospital room, at the graveside, in the failures, in the loneliness, in the prayer that seems unanswered, in the ashes.

Job wanted an explanation.

Instead he received an encounter.

And perhaps the deepest faith is finally being able to say, Lord, I still don't understand everything that has happened to me.

But I know you, and in any way I didn't know you before, but I know you now.

And even without all those prayers, I know enough to place my life into your hands.

That is not the faith of somebody who has figured everything out.

It's faith of someone who has finally discovered that God is greater than the answer to the question why?

Sometimes God does not give us the answer.

Sometimes God gives us Himself.

And at the end, Job discovered that God Himself was enough.

May that be our prayer as well.

Amen.