The Sacred Author uses a very long list of adjectives to describe Wisdom in the passage we read as the first reading for today's liturgy. My first reaction to reading this passage is one of admiration because it seems at times that we have lost most of these words in the context of daily conversation. In today's parlance, people and things are described as "awesome" or "amazing" or both. Very rarely do we hear any of the other adjectives that populate our English dictionary.
However, my second reaction is that this passage is also overwhelming in as much as it would take far more time and space than I have available today to come to understand how, for instance, Wisdom is subtle or mobile or agile or unhampered. This passage could provide anyone with hours or days of opportunities for contemplation, for a contemplative person could dwell on this word picture of Wisdom and never really exhaust its content.
Perhaps one way of coming to understand what the Sacred Author is saying here is to remind ourselves of St. Paul's conviction that Jesus Christ is the Wisdom of God (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:24). Somehow, putting the human face of Jesus and our experience of Jesus on Wisdom makes it far easier to understand. At the same time, it becomes very clear that Wisdom is not the way of this world because this world tends to shy away from the notion that the truly wise person lives for others rather than for others.
While I usually don't like to reference anyone from the world of politics in this blog, I cannot help but think of a statement made yesterday by someone from the political world that she fears that Pope Francis is being led astray by the sneering, liberal media. As another commentator has already said, if this is her impression of Pope Francis, how would she react if she ever met Jesus? Pope Francis has been hammering away at the notion that we have forgotten the simple life and the care of the less fortunate that is so much a part of Jesus' prescription for leading a holy life – two things that our world seems to have forgotten. Indeed, if Wisdom produces friends of God and prophets (Wisdom 7:27), one could argue that Wisdom has definitely penetrated our dark world in the person of this Pope who asks us to stop acclaiming "Francesco" and return to acclaiming "Gesu."
This particular passage from the Book of Wisdom only comes our way once every other year. I suspect that we need to hear it more frequently if we are to ever come to an understanding of what God is saying to us through this Scripture.
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator