Job 38:4-7

God finally answers Job out of a whirlwind, and the first thing he says is not an explanation. It is a question about masonry. Measurements, a line stretched, bases sunk, a cornerstone set — the vocabulary of a building site, as though the earth had been laid out by a surveyor working at dawn. Job has asked why he is suffering. What he gets is a tour of the foundations. And our own why, when we are the ones asking it, is rarely a simple request for information; underneath it there is usually something nearer an accusation — not help me understand but prove you are worth trusting. What the why is often after is a world we can verify rather than a Father we have to trust. It would be easy to hear that as a rebuke: you are small, be quiet. But listen to what is happening down at that cornerstone. There is singing. Before any of us was there to see it, the morning stars sang together and the sons of God — the angelic court, the whole congregation of heaven — shouted the way workmen shout when the last stone drops into place and the scaffolding comes down. The world was not assembled in cold silence. It was founded at a celebration we were not present for, because we did not yet exist. That is a strange comfort, and here it is the only one offered. God never tells Job why, and he never rebukes him for asking either; the anger at the end of the book falls on Eliphaz and his two friends, the men who had God's ways all worked out. He tells Job instead, in a voice that does not pretend Job is anything other than small, that the universe he is suffering inside was built in joy, by someone who was there when it was built. The smallness is real; the rebuke stands. It is the singing that keeps the smallness from crushing us. Our questions do not get answered so much as relocated — set down on the floor of a house whose foundations were laid by a craftsman who was singing. Job's ash heap sits on that floor. So does ours.

Dante, the Florentine poet who spent a whole book climbing toward the sight of God, ends not with an answer but with a motion — his own will turning at last like a wheel, moved by the Love that moves the stars. That is Job's ending too. He never learns why. He learns who was singing at the cornerstone, and that the singing has not stopped. In Christ that Love came down inside the house it had built, and suffered on its floor. More than that: the craftsman who set the cornerstone at dawn became the cornerstone himself, and not one that anybody wanted. "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone" (Psalm 118:22). The singing we were not there to hear is answered by a stone thrown out on a hill outside the city and set, by God, at the corner of everything he is still building.