Hungering for the Wisdom Jesus Hungers to Give Us, 4th Saturday (II), February 3, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Holy Family Parish, Manhattan
Saturday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Blaise, Martyr
February 3, 2018
1 Kings 3:4-13, Ps 119, Mk 6:30-34

Today’s homily was not recorded. The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel we see what Jesus’ compassion — God’s love — causes him to do for the crowds. His merciful love had first led him to take the apostles with him in a boat to a deserted place far away from the crowds so that they could rest with him, because they had been so busy preaching the Gospel and helping Jesus heal that they didn’t even have time to eat not to mention rest. The same Jesus likewise out of love regularly calls us apart to be with him so that he can give us rest by yoking himself anew to us. It’s what he does in prayer, in adoration, on days of recollection and retreat. But he won’t force us to accept that invitation. We, like the apostles, need to get into the boat with him and go away from our ordinary places in order to be with him.
• What I want to spend most of our time on, however, is what Jesus did with regard to the crowds when he disembarked, which shows another crucial aspect of his compassion. Even though St. Mark today doesn’t tell us anything about geography, elsewhere he does, and the route that the apostles would have taken across the top of the Sea of Galilee would have been about 4 miles. To walk along the upper lip of the Sea of Galilee from where they embarked to where they disembarked would have taken about 10 miles. But that’s precisely what a vast crowd did, so hungry were they for what Jesus was giving. Even though Jesus and the apostles would have likely still been tired when they were approaching the shore, even though they were trying to escape from the multitudes for a shirt time, St. Mark tells us that Jesus’ bowels exploded (the literal Greek phrase) with compassion for the crowds. He was sick to his stomach with compassion for them. And what did Jesus do out of compassion? St. Mark tells us, “And he began to teach them many things.” Along with feeding, healing,  forgiving, asking people to pray-and-sending-those-praying-forth-as-laborers, teaching is one of the five ways Jesus shows his compassion on the multitudes. It’s one of the five principal ways God loves us.
• What should be our response to this love of the Lord? To receive it. To desire his teaching. To recognize we need it. That’s the response we see in the first reading today and in the Psalm that responds to it. King Solomon was just 18 years old when he assumed the throne of his father David and he recognized that he was way too young to govern God’s people. Imagine going to any high school and taking the President of the Senior Class or even the Valedictorian and making him or her President of the United States. Would you feel confident that that person would be up to the task? Would you feel more or less confident of the person thought he or she was up to the task? Solomon had no such illusions. It would have been customary to make a sacrifice at the beginning of a reign, to ask for God’s help and to show everyone that you knew you needed God’s help. Solomon went to Gibeon to make such a sacrifice, but he didn’t just sacrifice one animal; he sacrificed 1,000, to indicate quite clearly to God and to everyone how much he knew he needed God’s assistance. And God was very pleased by his faith and humility. He appeared to him in a dream and told him, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.” He could have asked for anything at all. If we were given that command by the Lord, what would we ask for? Solomon, as God tells us later, didn’t ask for money, health, women, even peace from the enemies of Israel. He asked for what he knew he needed in order to be able to serve God and others. He asked for the Lord’s teaching. “O Lord, my God,” he said, “you have made me, your servant, king to succeed my father David; but I am a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act.…  Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong.For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?” He asked not only for prudence and an attentive conscience (knowing with the Lord) but for the grace to love what the Lord teaches and asks. That’s why he didn’t ask for an attentive mind, but for an understanding heart, so that he might judge God’s people with love for God and love for them and that he might not only distinguish right from wrong in conscience but help lead his people to do the right and avoid the wrong. We see how pleased God was by this request. He not only granted it but much else besides.
• God desires that each of us seek that same wisdom, prudence, and well-functioning conscience and that we love his teaching and guidance. That’s what we prayed in the responsorial psalm today. We begged God, “How can a young man — like Solomon — remain faultless? … By keeping your words. With all my heart I seek you. Let me not stray for your commands. Within my heart I treasure your promise, that I may not sin against you. Teach me your statutes. With my lips I declare all the ordinances of your mouth. In the way of your decrees I rejoice as much as in all riches.” We’re called to pray those words not just with our lips but with our hearts. God wants us to value his wisdom more than all riches, because it is a far more valuable wealth, something Solomon grasped and God wants us to grasp. With compassion he teaches us, but we must desire that divine gift!
• We’ll see over the course of the upcoming week how King Solomon responded to that gift and applied that wisdom. But we’ll also get a glimpse of how he fell from the gift. The Lord taught him and he knew what he needed to do, but over the course of time, he ceased to live by what the Lord taught. He eventually acquired 700 wives and 300 concubines — think about the lust involved that had captured his heart — and he began to think more about pleasing his enormous harem than pleasing the Lord, even going so far as to build some of his pagan wives altars so that they could worship false gods. It’s not enough for us either just to know what God wants. We must love it and love it not only with our heart but with our hands, our eyes, our ears, our feet, and our knees. We must seek his teaching to govern ourselves, our families, our parishes and others, but then we must respond to his help to implement that teaching. In response to our pleas for wisdom, God gives us something far greater than what he gave Solomon. God gives us himself, the Holy Spirit, with his gifts of wisdom and prudence, but we must live by the Holy Spirit and put to death life according to the flesh. That’s what Solomon didn’t do and eventually, despite all the gifts God had given him, he lived in such a way that right after his death, the Kingdom was divided and so much evil began to happen as a result. Our request for God’s wisdom is not for an intellectual gift or even for a one-time infusion of wisdom. It’s to help us to see things as God sees, to judge by God’s categories, to guide as God wants people to be guided. It’s a continual relationship because God never ceases to look upon us with compassion and to teach us because of that compassion. We, likewise, need to recognize that we’re always going to be in need of crying out, “Lord, teach me!”
• Today we celebrate a saint who was learned in the Lord’s wisdom and taught others this same treasure. Saint Blaise, Bishop and Martyr, was also distinguished by the individual care he gave the people of his Diocese of Sebastea in ancient Armenia (now part of modern-day Turkey). After Mass today there will be a special blessing through St. Blaise’s intercession so that God may free them of illnesses of the throat and all other maladies. This goes back to the care St. Blaise gave to a boy who was choking because of a fish bone. After all human means had failed, St. Blaise prayed that God would free the boy and God did. The boy survived. And people have been turning to St. Blaise ever since. This devotion shows God’s specific care for individual illnesses. None of us is a number.
•  Today the Lord looks upon us with compassion like he did the crowds at the Sea of Galilee, like he did upon St. Blaise, like he did upon young King Solomon, and he has lavishly given us his words of wisdom, hoping that we will hunger and thirst for his wisdom, for his voice whispering to us through the organ of sensitivity we call conscience, for his holy word by which he teaches us in Sacred Scripture. And he’s going to give us himself so that we can enter into communion on the inside with God’s Word and Wisdom incarnate. St. John Vianney used to say that if we had been given by God the same gift Solomon was, to ask for anything whatsoever we wanted, we would never have dreamed of asking for the incarnation, for Jesus’ death and resurrection, and for the way he gives his risen body to us to feed us until the end of time. But what we would never have dreamed to ask, God has in fact done. We enter into Holy Communion with the incarnate Wisdom of God.

These were the readings for today’s Mass: