The Memorial of Saint Jerome
Then Job answered, "Truly I know that it is so, But how can man be just with God? If he is pleased to contend with him, He can't answer him one time in a thousand. God is wise in heart, and mighty in strength. Who has hardened himself against him and prospered? He removes the mountains, and they don't know it, When he overturns them in his anger. He shakes the earth out of its place. Its pillars tremble. He commands the sun and it doesn't rise, And seals up the stars. He alone stretches out the heavens, And treads on the waves of the sea. He makes the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, And the rooms of the south. He does great things past finding out; Yes, marvelous things without number. Behold, he goes by me, and I don't see him. He passes on also, but I don't perceive him. Behold, he snatches away. Who can hinder him? Who will ask him, 'What are you doing?'
How much less will I answer him, And choose my words to argue with him? Though I were righteous, yet I wouldn't answer him. I would make supplication to my judge. If I had called, and he had answered me, Yet I wouldn't believe that he listened to my voice.
Do you show wonders to the dead? Do the departed spirits rise up and praise you? Selah. Is your loving kindness declared in the grave? Or your faithfulness in Destruction?
Are your wonders made known in the dark? Or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? But to you, Lord, I have cried. In the morning, my prayer comes before you.
Lord, why do you reject my soul? Why do you hide your face from me? I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up. While I suffer your terrors, I am distracted.
As they went on the way, a certain man said to him, "I want to follow you wherever you go, Lord."
Jesus said to him, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."
He said to another, "Follow me!"
But he said, "Lord, allow me first to go and bury my father."
But Jesus said to him, "Leave the dead to bury their own dead, but you go and announce God's Kingdom."
Another also said, "I want to follow you, Lord, but first allow me to say good-bye to those who are at my house."
But Jesus said to him, "No one, having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for God's Kingdom."
Today we celebrate Jerome — the fourth-century scholar, translator, and famously prickly saint who gave us the Latin Vulgate Bible, the translation that shaped Western Christianity for over a thousand years. He matters because he believed that knowing Scripture deeply was not optional for the Christian life — it was the whole point.
And then we get these readings, which are wonderfully uncomfortable.
Job is not in a philosophical mood. He's not crafting careful arguments about theodicy. He's raw. He looks at the vastness of God — the one who moves mountains without announcement, who commands the sun — and he says: what could someone like me possibly say? Notice how this isn't despair exactly. It's more like awe that has been roughed up by suffering. Job still speaks. He still turns toward God. But he's honest that the distance feels enormous.
Psalm 88 sits in the same territory — one of the few psalms that doesn't turn toward consolation. It just ends in darkness. And the Church includes it in our prayer anyway. There's something important in that. We don't have to manufacture resolution to bring something real before God.
Then Jesus, in Luke, keeps raising the stakes. Follow me — but know there's no guaranteed comfort. Follow me — but don't use reasonable obligations as permanent delay. The plow image is vivid: a farmer who keeps looking backward plows crooked rows. The work suffers. The kingdom suffers.
What connects all of this is the question of wholehearted orientation. Jerome gave his whole intellectual life to Scripture. Job gave his whole anguished honesty to God. The gospel asks us to give our whole direction to the kingdom — not perfectly, but without constant second-guessing.
What are we still looking back at? What "first, let me just..." is keeping us from moving forward? And what would it feel like to bring our real, unresolved selves — like Job — fully into God's presence today?