In today’s Old Testament scripture (Sirach 15:15-20) we hear Sirach saying “If you choose you can keep God’s commandments”. The phrase – “if you choose” reminds us that God, in his great benevolence, created us in his image with an intellect and will. God did not create us as slaves forced into doing his bidding. God could have done that but he didn’t. Rather, God created us as beloved children, with the freedom to form attitudes, make choices, and perform actions based on those choices.
But of course with this freedom – with this God-given power – comes great responsibility. We are called to make decisions and choices that are aligned with God’s goodness and his will for the world. We are called to make decisions and choices that bring us closer to God, not take us further away from him.
So one might ask – how can we know the path to take, how can we make the right choices?
I think one answer lies in a simple yet profound phrase that I came across while reflecting on today’s scripture – “the mysterious wisdom of God is not God’s secret possession”.
Let’s think about this.
God could have chosen to hide himself from us. God could have created us and left us to figure things out on our own. God could have left us in chaos and turmoil. God could have done this but he didn’t. Instead, out of his great love for us, God chooses to reveal himself and to bestow his wisdom upon us – a wisdom that for Sirach is “immense, all-knowing, and just” – a wisdom that, if embraced, allows us to live our lives to the fullest in accordance with God’s design.
Seems pretty straightforward, right? So what’s the difficulty?
Well, in this day and age of cable TV and social media we get bombarded with a lot of so-called “wisdom”. Turn on any channel and it’s either Oprah, Dr. Phil, Ellen, Whoopie, the political pundits, or a host of others dishing out their “wisdom” on how we are to think and behave in this world. But that’s just it, most of what is put in front of us is wisdom “of this world” – a wisdom that rarely takes God’s word into account. The key for us is to differentiate between the so-called wisdom of this world and the wisdom of God.
So we turn to Jesus – the font of all wisdom. We can always look to the words and actions of Jesus for the wisdom we need as we live out each day. Jesus’ preaching and works of love, mercy, forgiveness, inclusion, and sacrifice provide all the wisdom we need. So the key for us is to put aside much of the wisdom of the world and to pay closer attention to the wisdom found in Jesus.
In today’s gospel (Matt 5:17-37) we hear Jesus continue his great Sermon on the Mount providing us with an abundance of wisdom. I think that the big take away from this great sermon is that in order to live within the spirit of God’s law – God’s law of love – we must attend to the dispositions of our hearts. We must adopt a loving, kind, merciful, compassionate, tolerant, and forgiving spirit. Essentially we must, as St. Paul says, “put on Jesus”. We must allow Jesus to reign in our hearts.
Of course we can’t achieve this on our own. Our all-too human nature sometimes gets in the way. So we reach out for the Divine, knowing that we can only achieve this with God’s Spirit working in us. And maybe one place to start is to pray the words of the Psalm of today’s mass (Psalm 119). We can humbly ask God to “give us discernment” so that our “eyes might be opened”, so that we might be “instructed” by his wisdom, so that we might “walk in the way of our Lord”.
This is a prayer that I believe will never go unanswered.