Hand to the Plow

Most of us would rather negotiate with God than follow him. We’d like a hearing first, a chance to lay out our side, and a few reasonable conditions attached to our yes: after the kids are grown, once the job settles, when I’ve squared things with my family. Today’s readings take both of those instincts seriously and then press on them until they give way. In the First Reading, Job wants a courtroom. He’s been hit with loss after loss, and he knows exactly how he’d argue his case, if only God would show up and take the stand. Then he admits the truth: “Lo, he passes by me, and I see him not” (Job 9:11). In the Gospel, God does pass by, in the flesh, on the road to Jerusalem, with his face set toward the city. Three men meet him there. Every one of them has something to do “first.”

That little word reveals much about us. What we put first is where we actually place our trust, and it’s usually something we can keep an eye on, a thing we can manage while we wait to see where Jesus is really going.

Today the Church keeps the memorial of Saint Jerome, the fourth-century scholar who gave the West its Latin Bible and who, by every account, had a temper that could strip paint. He argued with nearly everyone. He also left Rome, went to Bethlehem, and stayed. So here’s the question these readings put to you and me: what’s the “first” standing between us and the road?

The Readings

First Reading: Job 9:1-12, 14-16

Then Job answered:

“Truly I know that it is so: But how can a man be just before God? If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer him once in a thousand times. He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength (who has hardened himself against him, and succeeded?), he who removes mountains, and they know it not, when he overturns them in his anger; who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble; who commands the sun, and it does not rise; who seals up the stars; who alone stretched out the heavens, and trampled the waves of the sea; who made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the chambers of the south; who does great things beyond understanding, and marvelous things without number. Lo, he passes by me, and I see him not; he moves on, but I do not perceive him. Behold, he snatches away; who can hinder him? Who will say to him, ‘What doest thou?’

How then can I answer him, choosing my words with him? Though I am innocent, I cannot answer him; I must appeal for mercy to my accuser. If I summoned him and he answered me, I would not believe that he was listening to my voice.”

Gospel: Luke 9:57-62

As they were going along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” But he said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Scriptural Analysis

By chapter 9, Job has buried his children, lost everything he owned, and spent a week on an ash heap listening to his friends explain why he deserved it. Bildad has just finished insisting that God never perverts justice (Job 8:3). Job’s answer opens with a surprising concession: “Truly I know that it is so.” He grants Bildad the point. His trouble is the next line: “How can a man be just before God?” The Navarre commentators call this speech a direct appeal to God to act as judge and come down on Job’s side. Job speaks “boldly, almost irreverently,” they write, “while staying within the bounds of orthodox teaching.” And they notice how thoroughly the chapter borrows the language of a lawsuit. That legal vocabulary makes a point: God does not act the way men do; human criteria can’t explain his actions, and “human standards should be set in accordance with God’s way of acting.”¹

Job knows he’d lose the case. One couldn’t answer God “once in a thousand times.” Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his literal commentary on Job, points out that a thousand was the largest number with its own name, so Job is saying that no number at all can measure how far divine justice exceeds ours, since ours is finite and his is infinite. Then comes the reason: God is “wise in heart, and mighty in strength.” Thomas explains that justice gets corrupted in two ways, by the cunning of the clever or by the violence of the strong, and God can’t be beaten at either. Job’s question in verse 4 is the one to hold on to: “Who has hardened himself against him, and succeeded?” Thomas reads it as a rule of peace. You can make peace with an equal by fighting him to a draw. With someone stronger, Thomas says, peace comes only “by submitting himself to him humbly.”²

Verses 5 through 10 widen the frame to the whole cosmos, mountains and pillars and stars. God “alone stretched out the heavens, and trampled the waves of the sea.” Aquinas reads that last phrase as wisdom at work: the waves are the most disordered things in nature, tossed here and there by the wind, and God subjects them to his government. The Navarre editors set a cross-reference beside the verse that a Christian can’t miss. It points to the night on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus came to his disciples walking on the water (Matthew 14:25; John 6:19).³ The one who “trampled the waves” in Job’s poem would one day walk across them in sandals.

Then verse 11: “Lo, he passes by me, and I see him not; he moves on, but I do not perceive him.” Scripture uses that verb for the moments God came closest to his friends. The Lord “passed by” Moses in the cleft of the rock (Exodus 33:22) and Elijah on Horeb (1 Kings 19:11). Job feels the opposite. God is moving all around him, and he can’t catch sight of him. Thomas offers a hard mercy here. God “comes near” a man when he gives him good things, and sometimes the good thing is a trial permitted for his salvation, since “all things work together for the good of those who love God” (Romans 8:28). “In this way God comes to man to obtain his salvation,” Thomas writes, “and yet man does not see him because he cannot perceive his kindness.” The Catechism says as much about all of us: “the ways of his providence are often unknown to us,” and only at the end, face to face, will we know them fully.⁴

So Job lays down his brief. “How then can I answer him, choosing my words with him?” The verb “answer” (Hebrew ‘ānāh, ah-NAH) belongs in a courtroom, and one modern commentary reads verse 15 as a man who, “even though innocent… cannot expect justice but can only throw himself on the mercy of his adversary who is also the judge.”⁵ Aquinas reads the same verse as the turn toward prayer. In Thomas’s Latin Bible, Job resolves to “ward off my judge by earnest prayer,” and he asks for mercy in place of justice. Thomas also explains why verse 16 sounds so bleak. God often hears a prayer the way a good doctor hears a patient begging him to take away the bitter medicine: he keeps the medicine and grants the health the man actually wants. The sufferer simply can’t see that he’s been heard.⁶ The Catechism puts Job’s posture at the foundation of every prayer: “humility is the foundation of prayer,” and “Man is a beggar before God.”⁷

Now the Gospel. A few verses earlier, Luke says that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Pablo Gadenz hears Isaiah’s servant behind it: “I have set my face like a flint” (Isaiah 50:7). Jesus knows what waits for him in the city, and he walks toward it anyway. A Samaritan village has just refused to receive him. Then, “as they were going along the road,” three men step up. Gadenz notes that the verb “follow” appears in all three conversations, and that Luke never tells us how any of them answered. The dialogues are left open, and the effect is to hand the question to the reader.⁸

The first man volunteers: “I will follow you wherever you go.” Joseph Fitzmyer calls it “a spontaneous, enthusiastic offer.” Jesus answers with a picture of his own life. The Son of Man is a homeless wanderer, with “no shelter, no home, no family.” Even animals, Fitzmyer says, “are better off.”⁹ Saint Bede, in the Catena Aurea, hears Jesus testing the man’s motive: why follow me for gain “when so great is My poverty that I have not even a place of rest”?¹⁰

The second man is called by Jesus himself. “Follow me.” He answers, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” Luke Timothy Johnson calls the request “the fulfillment of the obligation to ‘honor father and mother,’” the duty Tobit taught his son (Tobit 4:3-4). Gadenz adds that burial normally happened the same day, so if the father had already died, the delay would be short. If he hadn’t, the request may be an open-ended postponement dressed up as duty.¹¹ Jesus’ reply sounds brutal: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.” Fitzmyer gives the reading most interpreters hold: leave the spiritually dead to bury the physically dead. Gadenz names who the “dead” are: those who have not yet answered Jesus’ call. Saint Ambrose, in the Catena, is careful to add that the burial itself isn’t forbidden; “the observance of religious duty is preferred to the ties of relationship.”¹² And Jesus gives the man something to do: “go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” The Catechism states the balance plainly. “Family ties are important but not absolute,” and “the first vocation of the Christian is to follow Jesus.”¹³

The third man echoes the first and the second at once. He volunteers, and he attaches a condition: “let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Any Jew listening would hear Elisha. Elijah found him plowing with twelve yoke of oxen, threw his mantle over him, and Elisha asked to go kiss his father and mother goodbye first. Elijah let him (1 Kings 19:19-21). Johnson puts it bluntly: “Elijah allowed him; Jesus’ demand is stricter.” Gadenz explains why. Jesus is greater than any Old Testament prophet, so the commitment he asks is greater, and “those who follow him must do so unconditionally.”¹⁴

Then the image the whole Gospel turns on. “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Johnson says the Greek word for “fit,” euthetos (YOO-theh-tos), describes aptitude, a fitness for the work: “a sense of direction and concentration is required.” Gadenz notes that you have to keep looking forward if the furrow is going to come out straight. Fitzmyer says the one who follows Jesus “needs a firm hand and eye on the forward-moving plow,” and he adds the line that cuts closest: a decision to follow Jesus “calls for resolute determination,” as enthusiasm alone won’t carry it.¹⁵ The Fathers saw even more in the plow. Saint Augustine gives Jesus a one-line reply: “The East calls thee, and thou turnest to the West.” And Bede sees the Cross in the plow itself, its wood and iron wearing away “the hardness of our heart,” so that the one who looks back with Lot’s wife loses the kingdom.¹⁶

Put the two readings side by side, and one answers the other. Job can’t find God to argue with. “He passes by me, and I see him not.” He wishes for an umpire “who might lay his hand upon us both” (Job 9:33). In Luke, God passes by where everyone can see him, on a dusty road, and the one who can lay a hand on both God and man is walking to Jerusalem to do it. What he asks of the people he meets there is simple and total. Keep your hand on the plow, and keep walking behind him.

Daily Application

The interior movement these readings ask for is surrender of the “first.” We’re all better lawyers than we are disciples. We’ve built careful cases for why now isn’t the moment: the obligations are real, the timing is off, the family wouldn’t understand. Some of those obligations are holy, which is exactly why they make such good hiding places. Jesus reorders them, and he refuses to be the thing that waits.

Start where Job ends. Job keeps praying when he can’t see God. He takes the whole case to him and then asks for mercy. So be honest in prayer today. Tell the Lord what you’d argue if you could. Then pray Job 9:15 as your own: I can’t answer you, so I’m asking for mercy. Thomas says the answer may come the way medicine does, bitter and exactly what you need.

Then find your “first.” Everyone has one. Lord, I’ll get to confession once this rough patch is over. I’ll start praying every morning when the kids are older. I’ll look seriously at what you’re asking of my life after I’ve paid off the house. I’ll make things right with my brother when he apologizes first. Name yours, and then do the thing it’s been postponing, today, before the reasons regroup. A plowman who keeps checking behind him cuts a crooked furrow. Pick one straight line and walk it.

Saint Jerome knew how hard this is, from both sides. Franciscan Media describes a brilliant, prickly man who served as secretary to Pope Damasus, spent five years in the desert of Chalcis, and finally settled in Bethlehem, living in the cave believed to be Christ’s birthplace until he died.¹⁷ As a young monk, he wrote a letter to his friend Heliodorus, who had gone home instead of staying in the desert with him. Jerome quoted today’s Gospel to him: “Let the dead bury their dead.” He told him, “Do not call to mind old ties; the desert is for those who have left all,” and then admitted, “I have passed through troubles like yours myself.” The letter is fierce. Heliodorus went home anyway and in time became bishop of Altinum in Italy, which is its own way of following.¹⁸ Every disciple gets his own furrow. What doesn’t change is the direction.

Jerome shows us the one kind of looking back the plowman can afford. Franciscan Media tells of a pope who saw a painting of Jerome striking his breast with a stone and said, “You do well to carry that stone, for without it the Church would never have canonized you.”¹⁹ That’s repentance, and it keeps the plow moving.

Put your hand to the plow today. Strike your breast if you need to, set your face where he set his, and follow him without looking back.

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Notes

1. ↑ The Navarre Bible, Old Testament, commentary on Job, by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2004), 51.
2. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Book of Job, chap. 9, lect. 1, trans. Brian Mulladay, ed. Joseph Kenny, OP, at isidore.co; Navarre Bible, commentary on Job, 51-52.
3. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Job, chap. 9, lect. 2; Navarre Bible, commentary on Job, 52.
4. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Job, chap. 9, lect. 3; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 314.
5. ↑ Marvin H. Pope, Job, 3rd ed., The Anchor Bible (Doubleday, 1973), 71-72.
6. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Job, chap. 9, lect. 3.
7. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2559.
8. ↑ Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 195-196.
9. ↑ Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981), 834.
10. ↑ Saint Bede, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 9:57-62.
11. ↑ Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 163; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 197.
12. ↑ Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 836; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 197; Saint Ambrose, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:57-62.
13. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2232.
14. ↑ Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 163; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 198.
15. ↑ Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 163; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 198 n. 15; Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 837.
16. ↑ Saint Augustine and Saint Bede, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:57-62.
17. ↑ “Saint Jerome,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed September 29, 2026, franciscanmedia.org.
18. ↑ Saint Jerome, Letter 14.1-3, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
19. ↑ “Saint Jerome,” Franciscan Media.

Books Cited

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• Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Wisdom Books (Four Courts Press / Scepter Publishers, 2004)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, four-volume edition (Baronius Press)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press, 1991)