Job asks a question which every serious believer eventually has to face:
“How can someone be just before God?”
He looks at the greatness of God, the One who made the heavens, commands creation, and whose wisdom is beyond our grasp, and he realises how small human beings are before Him.
That is not meant to crush us. It is meant to put us in the truth.
God is God. We are His creatures.
And much of the spiritual life begins when we stop trying to make God fit inside our own understanding.
That gives us the Gospel.
Several people say they want to follow Jesus, but each has a condition.
“I will follow you wherever you go.”
“Let me first go and bury my father.”
“Let me first say farewell.”
None of those things sounds wicked. That is precisely the point.
Christ is showing that even good things must be put in their proper order.
“Follow me.” God comes first.
The man with his hand on the plough cannot keep looking backwards, because the furrow will never be straight.
Discipleship needs direction.
Saint Jerome understood both readings extraordinarily well.
He possessed one of the greatest minds of the early Church. He knew languages, studied manuscripts, translated Scripture, argued theology, and gave the Western Church the great Latin biblical tradition associated with the Vulgate.
Yet his learning did not make God smaller.
It made Jerome increasingly aware of the depths he was entering.
The more seriously we study Scripture, the less casually we should treat it.
This is not merely an ancient book to be mastered.
It is the Word through which God reveals Himself and leads us to Christ.
Jerome’s famous principle was simple:
“Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”
But Jerome also knew that knowing Scripture with the mind is not enough.
The scholar must become the disciple.
He left behind considerable worldly possibilities, embraced penance, and eventually lived near Bethlehem, studying the Scriptures close to the place where the Word had become flesh.
There is something beautiful in that.
A man spends his life studying words so that he may know the Word.
And that is the lesson for us.
We do not need to understand everything before following Christ.
Job could not understand everything.
Neither could Jerome. Neither can we.
Faith is not possessing God in our minds.
It is allowing ourselves to be possessed by Him.
So read Scripture. Study the faith. Ask questions.
Use the mind God has given you.
But when Christ says, “Follow me,” do not spend your whole life preparing to begin.
Put your hand to the plough.
Keep your eyes upon Him.
And go.
