The Gift of “Fear of the Lord”
by Fr. David M. Knight
Monday, September 30, 2024
Twenty-Sixth Week of the Year
Memorial of Saint Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church
Lectionary 455
Job 1:6-22/Lk 9:46-50
Job 1:6-22 raises the age-old question of whether those who claim to love God love him absolutely, because God is good in himself, or just conditionally, because they see him as being good to themselves. Unbelievers, like Satan in the story, say religious people would change their minds about God if he let them suffer. And some do. How many do we know who have stopped going to church in anger at God because of some terrible tragedy, like the death of a child? Or because they can’t believe an all-good God, if he exists, could allow such evil to happen?
Job’s faith and love are put to the test. He loses all he has, even his children. In his desolation, he speaks the same thought quoted above from a Greek tombstone: “Naked I came forth from my mother's womb, and naked shall I go back again.” But the point is different. The “pagan” epitaph spoke of the futility of life. Job speaks of it as gift:
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD!"
Job will not blame God for taking away something that was God’s gift in the first place. And this is rooted in a profound awareness of something we all know but tend to forget: that no human, or any other creature, is kept from reverting to pure nothingness by anything except the present, ongoing, continuing will of God to keep “breathing us” into existence. Every breath we draw is another—and a deliberate—gift of God.
Keeping ourselves aware of that helps us keep everything else in perspective. And to help us do that we have the gift of “Fear of the Lord”—the gift of the Holy Spirit that lets us appreciate God in all his awesome Truth and Goodness. It is ultimately by this gift that Job, in chapters 9, 38 and 42, finds his answer.
In Luke 9:46-50 Jesus teaches that the gift of perspective should keep us from exalting ourselves over others. If our only true and ultimate greatness comes from sharing in the divine life of God, all have equal greatness by “being Christ”—from the most accomplished adult to the least-developed child. Those who recognize this are “greater,” not by intrinsic superiority, but by greater self-effacement that lets Jesus act “with them, in them and through them” with less resistance. In Christian life “better,” or “more,” means nothing but more surrendered to him whose presence within us is the life we share with all.
That is why Jesus says to recognize anyone in whom he acts as being “on our side.” In fact, as Christ himself.
Initiative: Be great by being aware you are nothing—gifted with God’s life.
Reflections brought to you by the Immersed in Christ Ministry
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