17th Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2008

We talk (or at least we used to!) of the wisdom of Solomon.  What’s wisdom?  Some of you older ones will remember the list of the seven gifts of the Spirit (that we were expected to learn off by heart for Confirmation).  The first four were: wisdom, understanding, counsel and knowledge.  Knowledge is a bit like information, and deals with facts; understanding is the capacity to put facts together and to see the broader picture; counsel is the practical sense of how to act appropriately in line with the facts and their meaning.  So wisdom is connected to understanding, counsel and knowledge but distinct from them.

So what is it?  The First Reading today had Solomon ask for a heart to understand: It is a heart function, a gut function.  Beyond facts and meaning, prior to decision and action, wisdom has more to do with the capacity to weigh up, to evaluate.  (The Latin word for it is close to to get the taste of).  How do we acquire wisdom? Where do we get it from?  Wisdom is nourished by experience, searching and reflection.

In the gospel today, Jesus commended the disciple who like a householder brings out from his storeroom things both new and old.  Wise disciples have new things to bring out: they are open to experience, to be challenged, to grow, to move on, and to change. Yet they are not so foolish as to think they need personally to “re-invent the wheel”.  They are open to draw on the accumulated wisdom of the past, the old, to help make sense of the new.  They bring out from their storeroom things both new and old.  Like Mary, of whom Luke’s Gospel wrote: As for Mary, she treasured these things (experience) and pondered them in her heart... against the background of the Scriptural treasures of her people.

The disciple-householder Jesus spoke of may even have been something of a self-portrait.  Jesus followed a never-ending process of seeking and changing perspective - moving on from his initial sense of mission,  through the experience of the people’s and leaders’ incomprehension and unresponsiveness, wondering what was going on and what to do next, drawing thoughtfully on the insights and the imagery of his tradition, especially of Isaiah and of Daniel,  but taking them further and adapting them to his actual situation.

What is the content of wisdom?  What is the basic instinct of the wise person?  I think that Paul got close to it in today’s first Reading.  He seems to have seen the starting point of wisdom as the sense that God can be trusted, that God’s love can be trusted, and that, provided we are open to receive that love, all will be well.  He wrote: By turning everything to their good, God co-operates with all those who love him.  Paul was convinced that, in his love, God has called us, indeed, chosen us, forgiven and justified us, that we might come to share in the same life that energises Christ, as he put it, to be true images of his Son.

And interestingly, Paul adds that God has shared his glory with us – already, though not yet perfectly.  It can be a “now” experience, even if elusively so.  As we read this morning: (God) called those he intended  (to be true images of his Son): those he called he justified, and with those he justified he shared his glory.  We don’t know this so much with our heads (or if we do it’s not enough) but with our heart, in our gut.  It is a sort of intuitive experience: we sense it, we taste it.  More than that, we appreciate it, we treasure it,  we stand in wonder at it.  It may take a lifetime for hearts to sit comfortable with it, but, when we grasp it, we are on the way to wisdom.

The wonderful Mother Julian of Norwich wrote, way back in the late 1300s: All will be well; all will be well; all manner of thing will be well.  Whatever is going on in our world, we don’t need to feel that we have to control everything.  We  don’t need to diverge from the path spelt out for us by Christ, or to do things the world’s way, the way of so-called common-sense and often sterile realism.  We become free truly to trust God.  To know that in our hearts is true wisdom.  It is the pearl of great price.  It is worth not less than everything.