And if this link doesn't work (I have had so many issues with getting it set up today), here is the text of my homily. If you can't get in the front door, there's always the back!
6thSunday in Ordinary Time
The liturgical readings presented to us this Sunday makes references to wisdom in several places. All of us, to a man, wants to acquire wisdom in life, and we know that it is a very high complement when others speak about us as being wise. It is different from being called a wise guy, which is a derogatory term; used as an insult, and it is akin to calling someone a smartass or a jackass.
But a wise person is a different term altogether. People look up to those who give wise words of counsel, and it is even more attractive when their pace through life’s many twists and turns, ups and downs, are in tune and aligned with what comes out of their mouths. They not only talk and talk, but they also walk the walk. So when there is an option or a choice of how our lives ought to be lived, and the choice is between a wise way, and an unwise or foolish way, it really is no-brainer. Everyone will say that they will want to choose the wise choice or path in life.
Our first reading from the Book of Ecclesiasticus does appear to make it look easy though, and it’s seen in the way that he puts this choice before us – and the choices are almost polar opposites. Fire and water; life and death. Of course we know which we ought to, and will choose if the choices are so stark and dissimilar, like a choice between day and night, white and black, chalk and cheese, and good and bad. But all of us also know that most, if not all of the choices that we make in life are often anything butstark and clear cut. More often than not - they are in that grey area, where there is some evidence of light, as well as some evidence of darkness. Even in the choices that are sinful, there is some degree of goodness in them, and that is why sinners fall into sin – no one commits a sin for the sake of the bad in the sin. That would be a real twisted mind and someone who is almost totally evil in essence, and no one, except the devil, is pure evil. In fact, evil is never pure, so the phrase ‘pure evil’ is in itself an oxymoron.
The answer to this conundrum, when the path before us is neither all good versus all bad, is, as the writer of the book of Ecclesiasticus tells us, to live with a ‘fear of the Lord’.
Many do not understand what this term ‘fear of the Lord’ means, and when it is poorly understood, the result is that our relationship with God can end up twisted, unhealthy and even dysfunctional. To fear anything almost always has a negative connotation to it. But to fear the Lord in a healthy way really implies more an attitude that is positive than it is negative. It has its roots in the Hebraic mind, where oftentimes things are taught using hyperbole or over-exaggerationin order to bring home an essential point. Jesus uses hyperbole in today’s gospel where he tells us to cut off our hands and tear out our eyes. Of course Jesus doesn’t want us to live life as if we had just stumbled out of a very botched butcher’s attack from some B grade horror flick. But if we get the visual horror and disfigurement that sin does to our human bodies, that should shock us and make us wary of how our unwise choices, small though they may be, and innocent though they may seem, will affect our souls and the condition of its state after we die.
To fear the Lord therefore needs to be understood in the light of loving God. If we love anyone in this life, think of your spouse, your boyfriend or girlfriend, or your children, you would not want to do anything that would outrightly hurt them. You reverence that person so much that you will fear injuring the love that you have for that person. It is thatwhich you are fearing – you are exalting the love of the person so much, valuing and prizing it so highly, that you don’t want to do anything to harm or to damage that love. You will protect it, and cherish it, and surround it with a lot of tenderness and care.
If that makes sense for the way we treat a human person, now raise that relationship up many more notches to the relationship that we have with God, who is infinitely more important and more worthy of our devotion than any human being – that fear of injuring and disrespecting that love that we have for God and the love that God has for us, is where the fear is of greatest emphasis. That is the correct fear of the Lord. Not the fear that sees our knees knocking each time we walk into the church and cower with trembling limbs before the Blessed Sacrament because we see him as some sort of holy ogre, but the fear of not having given God our greatest respect and deference in life.
This kind of wisdom comes from not just good doctrinal teaching, but is a sum total of how we have been guided and taught by our parents, the kind of home that we had been brought up in, the moral choices that our parents and guardians and leaders have given and lived by example, and the kind of reverence that we see that our fellow brothers and sisters give God in the community that we are in. The more God-centered wisdom these people show us, the more our hearts will be sowing seeds of wisdom.
It is when this is understood well, that we will see wisdom in being careful in the very small things that seem trivial and maybe even inconsequential – for example being properly attired and participative at Mass, coming in not just punctually but early before Mass - to prepare our hearts and minds for worship, and centering our hearts so that we can give God our best. When this is how we put effort in the small things at worship, it will translate well into the ways that we live our lives outside of Mass. It is all related and connected, but if we are not training our hearts for wisdom, we will only see these as being fussy and OCD, and love God one way in the Church, and not love our brothers and sisters outside of the Mass.
Once we get this right, we will see that today’s gospel text is really an elaboration of how one’s life will look like when one cooperates with a heart and mind that is tuned in to wisdom.
Jesus gives us three aspects of life to bring home his point. Firstly, when we live with wisdom, and want to show a healthy fear of God in our choices, we will not only be careful in not outrightly killing our fellow man. That is way too obvious. That’s the black and white. But wisdom will want us to be sensitive to how even our words main or injure the reputation of others. We may not be bringing down a hatchet to split their heads open, but calling them fool or insulting them or gossiping about them can end up hardening their hearts.
We will also be very cautious of where our eyes land and how our hearts are being brought into darkness. Infidelity is always wrong, and no married person wants to commit adultery in an outright way. But in order to not be ending up an adulterer, one needs to be sensitive of how one may be objectivizing another human being, or gratifying oneself in marriage and how one averts one’s eyes on landing on unsavoury content on the internet.
Finally, when one lives the call to wisdom with effortful alertness, one will also be living an integrated life. This means that you will be a person of integrity, with no deceit, no disintegration or very little of it, in your heart. Jesus’ third teaching in today’s gospel addresses this when he says all we need to say is “yes” when we mean yes, and “no” when we mean no.
Having said all this, this morning, the one big question that needs addressing is how does one nurture wisdom in the heart? There is no course on wisdom – you can’t go to any institute of learning or university to get a degree in wisdom. Would that there were.
But it is really something that is more caught than it is taught. To catch it, you need to be exposed to it, a bit like catching the COVID-19 virus in order to be infected with it. But unlike the COVID-19 virus which can lead to death, ‘catching’ wisdom has the propensity to lead us to life. We catch wisdom by the things we expose ourselves to, to good role models, to teachers and parents who are interested in values more than they are interested in grades, promotions and reputation, and most of all, to developing a heart that learns to love God and to aid this by being careful that we are constantly in a state of grace.
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