Before man are life and death, good and evil…
How do you know what to
choose?
Thanks to the gift of free
will, humankind has for all of time been required to make choices. As the Book of Sirach tells us, Before man are life and death, good and evil,
whichever he chooses shall be given him.
But Sirach also gives us a clue as to how to make good choices: ideally, we must strive to see as God
sees, which is the very definition of wisdom:
Immense is the wisdom of the Lord. We must also trust in God, and listen to where our heart tells us to go – a
response that is possible through prayer, because prayer puts us at our core,
where God dwells in us. More
specifically, Psalm 119 encourages us to pray for discernment, that we may
observe God’s law and keep it with
all our heart. If we are committed to the Lord’s way, to the
Lord’s laws, then we will be blessed.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus
goes one step further, reminding his disciples that the letter of the law is insufficient:
they must look to the spirit
of the law, recognizing, for example, that anger
itself is a form of murder, for we can kill a relationship as surely with anger
as with a weapon. For Jesus,
divisiveness is never justified: all
that we do must be done in consideration of how our actions affect others, and
how our deeds might be life-giving to others, rather than tearing them
down. After all, discernment is a
process: if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother
has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be
reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift. And discernment should always lead to
love.
The Corinthians have had a
hard time grasping this concept. Thanks to Jesus’ death and resurrection, we now
have access to the depths of God through the Spirit: we
speak God’s wisdom, Paul says, mysterious,
hidden but now revealed to us through
the Spirit. We need heart wisdom to
understand that Jesus is the fullest expression of God’s love, a unifying love,
connecting and binding us to one another.
It is that love that must govern our choices. So, if we have come to understand what God
has prepared for those who love him, then
we know that it is to the heart of God that we must open our own hearts, and to
the wisdom of God that we must entrust our choices, and our lives.
This post is based on Fr.
Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: Wordle
No comments:
Post a Comment