Resolutely Devoted to the Truth, 8th Saturday (I), May 29, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Pope Saint Paul VI
May 29, 2021
Sir 51:12-20, Ps 19, Mk 27-33

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we finish our study of the Book of Sirach, which takes place during the Seventh and Eighth Weeks of Ordinary Time every second year. But insofar as every year we lose one-and-a-half weeks of Ordinary Time readings due to the dates of when the Lenten and Easter seasons take place, we often lose these readings from Sirach. The last time we had today’s passage, for example, was a decade ago. So it’s important that we get the larger goal of what God is trying to communicate to us through Ben Sira. Yesterday he mentioned that the greatest of all his works is making “godly men” and women. Today we see one of the foremost attributes of someone who is holy: they pursue the truth, they hunger to see things as they really are, as God sees them, and to live according to that truth. Ben Sira describes, “When I was young and innocent, I sought wisdom openly in my prayer … and I will seek her until the end. … My heart delighted in her. My feet keep to the level path because from earliest youth I was familiar with her.” He lived the path of wisdom. “I became resolutely devoted to her — the good I persistently strove for. My soul was tormented in seeking her.” That’s a sign of the great passion he had. “My hand opened her gate and I came to know her secrets. I directed my soul to her and in cleanness I attained her.” His whole being sought to live by God’s wisdom, and because he was pure of heart, God allowed him to attain her. The reading allows us to ask ourselves how ardently we seek the truth of the Lord, how tormented we are in seeking her, whether from your youth we persistently strive for her. For Ben Sira, this meant seeking the Lord through the study of Sacred Scripture and through prayer. In the Psalm today, we see the gift of Sacred Scripture, that we’re pursuing not a straightjacket but a liberation. The Law of the Lord is perfect, soul-refreshing, trustworthy, wisdom-imparting, right, full of joy, clear, illuminating, pure, enduring, true, just, precious and sweet. That’s what one who resolutely pursues God and the word, will and wisdom of God experiences!
• In today’s Gospel, we meet scholars of the law — the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders — who likely had begun to seek wisdom in their younger days with great passion like Ben Sira, but who had become corrupted over time. They no longer sought it in cleanness of heart. They no longer kept their feet to the level path. They no longer even delighted in it, because when Jesus came to proclaim and enflesh it, they totally opposed him. And they couldn’t even admit to the truth when they were asked about it directly: they sought to spin reality toward their advantage in a refusal to walk in the light. We see all of this in today’s Gospel. The the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders were seeking to entrap Jesus the day after he had driven out the money changers from the temple. They asked him about the authority with which he was doing such things, anticipating that if he said his own authority, they could have him arrested for vandalism or worse, and if he said God’s authority they could entrap him for seeming to oppose God’s will with regard to the temple. He transcended the question by first getting them to confront the truth as proclaimed by St. John the Baptist. When Jesus asked, “Was John’s baptism of heavenly or of human origin?,” he was doing more than just getting them to say heavenly or human, something that would, the chief priests and scribes recognized, put them in an awkward situation. It was not some political stunt to evade their question, but an attempt to get them to come to the light by acknowledging some truth — for without truth, authentic communication is impossible. Their replied showed that they could care less about the truth and about whether John’s baptism was from God; they just wanted to give the best “policy position” that would keep them in the favor of the crowd. They discovered that neither posture would keep them out of trouble so they simply feigned ignorance. Jesus, hence, told them nothing because they were not looking for the truth. In mentioning St. John the Baptist, Jesus was also bringing them to a figure of conversion, to the one who came to make straight the paths for the Lord and his Messiah, and that’s something they were refusing, because they themselves didn’t think they needed conversion. When they refused to act on the message of conversion John was announcing, it was clear that they would similarly refuse Jesus’ words and deeds of conversion, and hence there was no reason for Jesus to state the triune authority on which he was acting, because to them it was a rigged trivia contest rather than an honest conversation. While in their youth, they pursued wisdom, in their old age, they resisted it. In this they remind us of the two corrupt judges in the Book of Daniel who lustfully sought out Susanna and then turned on her when she wouldn’t gratify them. They had “grown evil with age” (Dan 13:52).
• The key lesson is whether we “seek wisdom until the end” with perseverance or whether we allow ourselves to get corrupted. We see in the life of King Solomon, blessed with divine wisdom at 18, how he became corrupt at the end and, after having built the Temple to the one true God, started to build pagan shrines for many of his 1,000 wives and concubines. We see it in corrupt figures in the Church, who seemed to have zeal when they were younger, but started living the lie of a double-life later, living more for fame, power, pleasure and honor than by faith, hope and love. We see it in our culture. A couple of weeks ago, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which legal scholars tell us could be used to overturn Roe and Casey, which we pray it will. There was renewed focus on the corruption of the Supreme Court Justices back in 1973 in their machinations to invent a right to abortion and deny the truth of the humanity of the human beings growing in the womb. Echoing the obfuscations of the chief priests, scribes and elders in today’s Gospel, Justice Blackmun and the six others in the majority basically wrote with regard to the question of whether an abortion kills a human being: “If we say human life begins at conception, then how could we possibly allow abortions? If, on the other hand, we say that it doesn’t begin at conception, how can we possibly defend ourselves against the biologists, philosophers and photographers all of whom see human life in the womb at the earliest stages? Therefore, let us say we don’t know when it begins…” — which is exactly what they ended up writing. They did not care about what the truth was. Like the worst sophists, they merely manipulated language to justify something intrinsically wrong. And we have many other examples of the culture of death, based on a culture of lies, in today’s world.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of Pope St. Paul VI. He was one who sought to defend and propose the wisdom of God at a time in which cultural changes were happening so fast that were trying to pretend as if there were no truth at all. He presided over the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council and in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), which he signed in 1965, the Church taught, “The intellectual nature of the human person is perfected by wisdom and needs to be, for wisdom gently attracts the mind of man to a quest and a love for what is true and good. Steeped in wisdom. man passes through visible realities to those which are unseen. Our era needs such wisdom more than bygone ages if the discoveries made by man are to be further humanized. For the future of the world stands in peril unless wiser men are forthcoming” (15). They asked, “How can we quickly and progressively harmonize the proliferation of particular branches of study with the necessity of forming a synthesis of them, and of preserving among men the faculties of contemplation and observation which lead to wisdom?” (56). He eventually answered the question in his beautiful exhortation on evangelization, Evangelii Nuntiandi. Christ is that synthesis. He wrote, “The presentation of the Gospel message is not an optional contribution for the Church. It is the duty incumbent on her by the command of the Lord Jesus, so that people can believe and be saved. This message is indeed necessary. It is unique. It cannot be replaced. It does not permit either indifference, syncretism or accommodation. It is a question of people’s salvation. It is the beauty of the Revelation that it represents. It brings with it a wisdom that is not of this world. … It is truth. It merits having the apostle consecrate to it all his time and all his energies, and to sacrifice for it, if necessary, his own life” (5). As he said at the conclusion of his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1965, “To put it in a word, the edifice of modern civilization has to be built on spiritual principles, for they are the only ones capable not only of supporting it, but of shedding light on it and inspiring it. And we are convinced, as you know, that these indispensable principles of higher wisdom cannot rest on anything but faith in God.”
• Today, having heard the word of God, we thank him for it and pronounce it perfect, soul-refreshing, trustworthy, wisdom-imparting, right, full of joy, clear, illuminating, pure, enduring, true, just, precious and sweet. We commit ourselves to seek it openly in our prayer until the end, to delight in it, to live it on the level path, to strive for it persistently with resolution devotion, directing our souls to it so that, by God’s grace, we may attain it. We ask Mary, Seat of Wisdom, and Pope St. Paul VI to pray for us. We ask the Holy Spirit to impart it. And, as we prepare to receive him, we ask Wisdom incarnate to help us enflesh it.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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