Mass readings for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Proverbs 9.1-6 Psalm 34.1-2, 9-14 Ephesians 5.15-20 John 6.51-58
Our liturgy of the word began today with an invitation to come to a banquet: come to a table laden with rich food and good wine. It is being hosted by Wisdom, and she has sent out her serving maids, and herself gone to the high places of the town to call out to the community, “You that are simple, turn in here! Come eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed!”
Now, I can’t help but wonder if inviting people by calling them “simple” is the best approach, but she is wisdom after all, and to her I will defer.
But I hope we all have made that connection intended by the designers of our lectionary, the cycle of readings that has us, from week to week, reading from the Old and New Testaments, the Psalms, and of course, the Gospel, with all these texts in some way thematically relating to each other.
And these connections aren’t just lately dreamed up by modern church scholars. The relationship between them has long been recognized. And I think we all get the connection, because who in scripture, who in our tradition, do we think of when the talk is of coming to a banquet, a big party, where we will all be fed? And, of course, that’s Jesus.
So, what does this figure of wisdom have to do with our Lord and the heavenly banquet? Well, this wisdom, need I say it, is God’s wisdom; that is, it’s perfect wisdom. And wisdom, exercised with reason, points us to Jesus and our being admitted to the wedding. That invitation to come and feast at Wisdom’s table, that’s the eucharistic feast anticipated in Hebrew Scriptures. So, the implied argument is this: as difficult, as outrageous as the words of Jesus are that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood to have eternal life; wisdom will lead you to understand that he’s right.
In the ancient faith, what preceded Judaism, that faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; when the name attached to God was, well, alternately, Yahweh and Eli, Israel was groping its way toward monotheism, the essential oneness of God. There nonetheless were remnants of polytheism that persisted in Israelite thinking; and one thought was that God was king, but to be a proper king, he must have a queen. And she, not quite co-regnant, but always at his side was “his Asherah” that is, “his wisdom.” So, we can imagine this picture of God enthroned in the high heavens, resplendent in his kingly glory, and to his left (mind you, not his right) sits Wisdom. And it is she who speaks to us today.
And how wonderful to think on our forebears in faith who discerned that among all God’s qualities, his glory, his mercy, and so on, it was his wisdom that stood out in their minds so much that they conceived of it in terms of personhood – but also understanding that “person” as relating to God as a wife to a husband. And if we bring our Catholic sacramental perspective to this, our teaching that a married couple is essentially one, then we get some idea of what ancient Israelites are on about: not a god and a goddess but something, someone more profound and complex than a mere sky-god who throws thunderbolts and bellows down in thunder, but a god that makes plausible the idea that we are made in his image and likeness.
God made us through his Logos, his rational mind conceived of us, his word made it so; and we are male and female. Made in his image, our reason gives us that resemblance to him, but just as male and female are counterparts to each other, our reason needs its counterpart, its partner, its indispensable compliment; and that is wisdom. Reason without wisdom, such as we see exercised so much today, is foolishness. It’s a superficial rationality that too often becomes the brute application of power to address an immediate problem without thought given to consequences, all those unintended consequences that wisdom asks us to humbly, patiently contemplate. To attempt wisdom without reason, is equally apt to descend into foolishness, because then it is just nostalgia, a longing for the past and an irrational application of it to our current problems.
Now, to be clear, we differentiate divine wisdom from the “wisdom of the world.” Indeed, God’s wisdom is foolishness to the wise of this world. For example, the wisdom of personal sacrifice is made plain in the story of Christ. Yet, we can hear today people who are aghast at the story of Christ’s passion, and see in it only senseless suffering; and that in turn has led to a horror of suffering, and people, in their worldly wisdom, doing all they can to avoid true sacrifice and the suffering that comes of it to disastrous moral effect. Not only do we become, soft, spineless creatures, we begin to indulge in evil practices such as medically-assisted suicide with its ever-expanding mandate, all in the name of preventing suffering.
But we know from our own experience of history, of our own lives, that life requires sacrifice, that nothing comes of nothing, but everything comes of our giving of ourselves for the sake of something and someone other than ourselves; and to sacrifice is to suffer, even a little, as we give something up for another.
Christ doesn’t come for his own sake, but for ours – for God so loved the world; and we worship Christ in the wisdom of that, so that we can live by that wisdom.
So, as much as we can be logical about things, rational in our thinking, we need wisdom to be truly, fully in Christ.
Our own St. Augustine had the attainment of this wisdom as a central theme in his teaching, preaching and writing. We are to strive after wisdom, and our patron famously set down the steps towards its attainment.
He wrote in his treatise On Christian Doctrine that the path to true wisdom begins with the fear of God – and that really is a coming to recognize the consequences of living our lives apart from God, seeing in the misery, the dysfunction of our lives that we are heading toward our destruction, not only in this life, but for an eternity in the next. So, that turns us to God, and we start in prayer. Augustine calls it piety, and in our day, it’s best understood as knowing that we better get ourselves to church. We might not know what we’re doing here, what anybody else is doing, but it’s time to get here and join in, and hope that the ritual, the prayer, the singing and the chanting, that it will start to put our head and heart right.
And it’s in this place that we hear God’s word, and Augustine tells us, that through it we come to the next step, and that is knowledge. However, he means by this a terrible knowledge of our predicament. We may have sensed something was wrong before, but now we have a sense of its true dimensions as we listen to the prophets, and to the words of Christ himself. That is, we have the particulars. It’s kind of like taking the car in for that “noise” you can’t track down, and now the mechanic comes with the bad news, itemized and costed; not welcome, but at least we know what we’re dealing with, and there is an answer, a solution, a possibility of repair.
And Augustine here writes that one takes in soberly the extent of the problem, but also that it can be solved, albeit at some cost,
“For the knowledge of a good hope makes a man not boastful, but sorrowful. And in this frame of mind he implores with unremitting prayers the comfort of the Divine help that he may not be overwhelmed in despair, and so he gradually comes to the [fourth] next step,—that is, strength and resolution,—in which he hungers and thirsts after righteousness. For in this frame of mind he extricates himself from every form of fatal joy in transitory things, and turning away from these, fixes his affection on things eternal…”
And once we fix our hearts and minds on the eternal, on Christ, we’ve arrived at wisdom; and then for the rest of our lives we struggle to stay in it and live by it; or as Jesus puts it, that we abide in him as he abides in us.
So, come to table, sit with the rest of us who’ve come to be fed by word and sacrament. Our salvation is not worked out alone, but in good company, the companionship of fellow believers, the hospitality of God’s Holy Wisdom, all possible through the benefaction of Christ, the provider of the feast.
Amen.