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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
Today’s readings remind us that sometimes you just cannot win. Saint John the Baptist and Jesus had different “styles” but they were both doing the will of God.
Wisdom is vindicated by her works
What a powerful phrase at the end of today’s gospel. Wisdom is vindicated by her works. You know, throughout the Old Testament, there is a trend or a type, a genre of literature that we do refer to as the wisdom books.
Now, it’s not wisdom in just collecting a lot of facts. It’s much deeper than that. We can conclude something pretty quickly if it’s only a matter of fact. My former student master said that we should never argue about matters of fact, because we can just look it up and see what is true when somebody did this or whatever. Facts are easy to accumulate.
Wisdom, however, is something much deeper. In many respects, it’s not just a collection of facts. It’s knowing what to do about the facts we collect. It’s about seeing the world not as we see it, but as God sees it. Because God’s way of seeing things is not always immediately obvious.
Here’s what I mean. You know, it could be the case where we have to stand up for something that’s right, and if we do, horrible things will happen. And so we say, well, you know, I think I’m just going to kind of stand aside. I’m not going to say anything, or I’m not going to do anything, or so forth. And from a human perspective, keeping the peace might be a value.
But what if someone is harmed because of our unwillingness to stand up for something? You know, there’s a well-known crime trend that if there are a lot of people who witness a crime, people are much less likely to step forward to prevent it. Because the feeling is, well, somebody else will do it. There’s all these people around here.
Sometimes standing up for what we believe is a challenge. Sometimes recognizing what it means for us as individuals to follow Jesus can be a challenge. It’s not always easy. There was a priest one time who said in a homily, if it seems always easy to follow Jesus, then perhaps the question needs to be asked, are we really following Jesus at all?
If there’s never a challenge, Jesus helps us, though, to see something else. Wisdom also recognizes that each one of us is called to do what God wants us to do, and two people in the same house might be called to do two different things.
The role of John the Baptizer, I think, was to shake people up and to get their attention. And he did. He was an odd duck. Father Benedict Groeschel says he was a classic example of a borderline personality, and there’s probably some truth to that. But by shaking people up, he prepared the way for Jesus, which was his job. It was his vocation. It was his role.
Conversely, Jesus has a different mission in some ways. There is certainly harsh language, but at the same time, there’s a desire to go out to the margins to offer the good news there. Let us ask the Lord today that we might use this day to think about the wisdom of God, to see what it is that we need to do to obtain it, and to allow our works to vindicate what wisdom has called us to do.
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