How open are we to
the wisdom of God?
It’s so hard to
get our heads around God’s ways. The
Book of Wisdom confronts this problem directly:
Who can know God’s counsel, or who
can conceive what the Lord intends?
Life is a struggle during which humans gain wisdom primarily through
trial and error, and we can so easily get bogged down in the limitations of
human physicality: the earthen shelter weighs down the mind. But God is a source of revelation, sending
his spirit from on high so that we
might see ever more clearly the more we open to it. Psalm 90 also struggles to get a sense of
God’s vision, of God’s understanding of the cosmos. Here, we see humankind, which is mortal,
reaching out to God, who is immortal; man is time-bound, while God is
eternal: a thousand years in your sight are as yesterday. We will never understand these mysteries on
earth; we must therefore open to gaining God’s wisdom, a wisdom of heart, as best we can:
teach us to number our days aright,
the psalmist sings, that we might celebrate the life that you have given to
us all with joy and gladness.
Christ’s love for
us is similarly unfathomable, and does not depend on whether we love him back
or not. But if we are to love him, he tells
us in Luke’s Gospel, then that love must come first, before any human
relationships we might have, whether they be with father, mother, wife, children, brothers or sisters. In effect, we must
allow our relationships with others to be perfected through our relationship
with the Lord first of all, and this has a cost: Jesus calls on us to carry our own cross. To do this, we should, like the person wishing to construct a tower or lead an
army into battle, first calculate the cost. For Christ asks us to renounce all our possessions;
only knowing what his love costs and accepting that cost can we focus on
love God reveals to us. Likewise, Paul
asks Philemon to consider his former slave Onesimus as more than a slave, a brother, … beloved to you as a man and in the
Lord. Philemon can choose to be one with Onesimus in Christ, as we are one
in Christ with God – he has but to open to God’s vision.
Openness to God’s wisdom
requires a radical shift in our vision, in our way of seeing all things, and in
all of our relationships with others.
Every relationship we have is redefined and enhanced when we embrace
God’s vision – as best we can – and no relationship so much so as our
relationship with our Lord, whose gracious
care transforms us, and whose wisdom
offers us love beyond measure, timeless, eternal.
This post is
based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
No comments:
Post a Comment