Seeking True Wisdom and Wealth, Fifth Wednesday (II), February 11, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Basilica of St. Mary, Phoenix, Arizona
The Theology of Gift Conference, University of Mary
Wednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, World Day of the Sick
February 11, 2026
1 Kings 10:1-10, Ps 37, Mk 7:14-23

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Today we conclude The theology of the Gift Conference focused on fostering the vocation every disciple has to use the good God has given as co-responsible stewards of the mission of the Church, the Word of God and today’s observance of the World Day of the Sick on the Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes has us focus on the subject of the gift of God’s wisdom and the way we’re supposed to seek and harness it as true wealth. It gives us a chance to ask what types of sacrifices we’re making to come to know and enter into communion with the God of wisdom, how we’re called to receive, ponder, and pass on the gift of divine light, and how we’re called to help others recognize, seek, live by and share this divine endowment.
• In the first reading, we have the remarkable scene of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon. Sheba was located at the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula, encompassing modern Yemen across the Red Sea from Ethiopia. She and her enormous retinue undertook a journey on foot and caravan of about 2,300 miles — the distance it would take to walk between New York City and the California border! — in order to come into Solomon’s presence in search of his wisdom. She had heard reports in her country thousands of miles away about his wisdom and his deeds. On Saturday, at daily Mass, the Church meditated upon Solomon’s answer to God’s question to him, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.” The 18-year-old baby king’s response was for an “understanding heart to distinguish right from wrong” in order better to govern God’s people. God was so pleased with the answer that he promised to give him a “heart so wise and understanding” that no one until then, and no one after, would equal him. Immediately thereafter that wisdom was put to the test when two women who had just given birth came to him, one who had tragically smothered her child rolling on top of her baby during her sleep. In the middle of the night she had taken the other woman’s child as her own. In an age prior to DNA testing, there was no way to know for sure whose mom the living child was. Solomon asked for a sword to cut the child in half, thereby exposing who the real mother was. The woman who had stolen the baby was fine with the solution. The true mom begged him to give the child to her competitor lest the child die. The teenage king, with that wise and understand heart God had given him, recognized who the real mom was and awarded the child back to her. The sacred author tells us, “When all Israel heard the judgment the king had given, they were in awe of him, because they saw that the king had in him the wisdom of God for giving judgment.” That was just the beginning. The First Book of Kings goes on to tell us, “God gave Solomon wisdom and exceptional understanding and knowledge, as vast as the sand on the seashore. … He was wiser than all other men and his fame spread throughout the neighboring nations. Solomon also uttered three thousand proverbs, and his songs numbered a thousand and five. He discussed plants, from the cedar on Lebanon to the hyssop growing out of the wall, and he spoke about beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. Men came to hear Solomon’s wisdom from all nations, sent by all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom.”
• This was the context that the Queen of Sheba came to test him with subtle questions. Solomon explained everything she asked about, the text relates, and there remained nothing that he could not explain to her. She said that his wisdom surpassed even the reports she had heard and she praised the great fortune of Solomon’s servants who had a chance to be with him and hear his wisdom. In gratitude, she emptied her treasury, giving him 120 gold talents a huge quantity of spices and precious stones. Just to give you a sense of how valuable she accounted the gift of Solomon’s answers, the gift of divine wisdom, we could focus just on the money she gave. A talent was a weight of measurement. Each gold talent weighed 75 pounds. She gave Solomon 120 of those talents that she had brought along her 2,300 mile journey in her caravan. The price of gold this morning is $5,701.40 per ounce. So the value of just the gold she gave him, in today’s money, is 120 talents, times 75 pounds per talent, times 16 ounces per pound, time $5,701.40 per ounce. Get ready: just in money she gave $821,001,600. And there’s no way to calculate the cost of the precious stones and the huge quantity of spices. Solomon’s wisdom, or better God’s wisdom given to Solomon, was more valuable to her than close to $1 billion.
• We can ask ourselves how much we value God’s wisdom, whether we would pay an enormous sum to obtain it, whether we would walk 2,300 miles through a desert to obtain it, whether we would have the hunger and the unanswered questions about so many things with regard to human life to grasp how much we need it. But there’s a more important point. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus referred to this hunger of the Queen of Sheba and said that it was a test for the people of his age and our own. “At the judgment,” he said, “the queen of the south will arise with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and there is something greater than Solomon here.” If the Queen of Sheba made such a journey and expended so much for Solomon’s wisdom, how much more, Jesus was saying, should we desire and be willing to make enormous sacrifices to obtain Jesus’ own teaching! We’ve all been privileged to meet people who make this sacrifice, especially converts to the Catholic faith. Sometimes they need to pay the price of being disowned by their family. Sometimes leaders in different Christian denominations have to give up their titles, houses, prestige, even the flock of their parishes or dioceses to enter the Church. Sometimes those in certain places of the Middle East, Africa and Asia put their lives on the line to do so. But they do! They recognize in Jesus the pearl of great price worth selling everything else to obtain. The sacrifice is small, they deem, compared to the gift they receive. They’ll journey to the end of the earth. They’ll sacrifice far more than gold, spices and gems. And that is the treasure God has placed in our earthen vessels. That’s the treasure we’re called lavishly to share. And that is only part of the gift we have in God, a gift we’re called to seek, to steward and to share.
• But for us to share the faith effectively, we can’t just be spiritual consiglieri imparting divine wisdom as discarnate proverbs. It’s got to come from within. It’s got to be more than heard, but seen. Jesus describes this truth in today’s Gospel. The greater-than-Solomon gives us his wisdom on something that was truly revolutionary in the Jewish mindset of his day. “Hear me, all of you, and understand,” he says. “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” Right before this, in the Gospel the Church pondered yesterday, Jesus was criticized because he and his disciples didn’t do the scrupulous ritual washings of their hands, cups, jugs, kettles, beds and so many other objects upon which the Pharisees in Jesus’ day insisted. These were all basically human hygienic traditions that hadn’t been revealed by God but had become a collective neurosis for the Pharisees and a substitute for real worship. Jesus said that nothing coming from the outside, either touching a jug or a ritually impure person, or even anything we eat, can make us impure in the sight of God. The purity that God cares about, he said, is what comes from the heart. Jesus had come to give us a heart transplant, to take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh, hearts like his, hearts that could love God and others. He wanted us to help us become pure of heart. The heart is the real core of the person, pointing to what we love and desire. It’s what’s in the heart — and the actions that flow from the heart — that renders a person pure or impure, holy or sinful, Jesus says. He says that from the heart, from what we desire, come sins like “evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.” I want to focus only on the last one, folly, which is basically the lack of wisdom. The Greek word that St. Mark uses, aphrosune, doesn’t point to an imprudence flowing from a frail brain or intellect. Rather, it means a moral foolishness, the result of those who play the fool by acting contrary to God’s wisdom. This is the type of folly that can affect everyone, even those with high IQs, like we see, often, among those in the academy, or in positions of leadership in politics or culture. The point for us is that while aphrosune originates in the heart, so does, to a degree, sophia, true wisdom. While always a divine gift, as we see in the life of Solomon, wisdom is similarly the result of a desire, a desire to know the truth, a desire to journey and sacrifice for the truth, a desire to live the truth. In the Psalm today we see what happens in the heart of the person who is wise. “The mouth of the just murmurs wisdom,” we prayed. If we’re truly in a right relationship with God, we are going to be “regurgitating” on God’s wisdom, letting it echo within, trying to understand it, and speaking of it to others. To become just, to become holy, to become pure, flows from what we’re murmuring on within. And so, everything depends on whether we’re ruminating on the things of God, on the truth, on wisdom, or whether we’re chewing disproportionately on politics, or sports, or the weather, or gossip, or grudges, or the types of sinful desires Jesus describes.
• We can, today, make two applications of these truths. The first is to Our Lady here in this Basilica dedicated to her. She is often called Sedes Sapientiae, the Seat of Wisdom, because Wisdom incarnate, the greater than Solomon, took up his throne within her womb and then in her lap. She became Virgin Most Prudent because she nourished herself on everything God had revealed, pondering and treasuring it in her contemplative heard and seeking to align her whole life in accordance with God’s word. We celebrate our Lady today under the title of Our Lady of Lourdes, because it was on this day in 1858 that she began appearing to St. Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France, a village in the French Pyrenees, enriching this gift who had never received a formal education with the wisdom that came from God, involving her in the work God wanted to accomplish in Lourdes, and helping her ultimately become a saint. Pilgrims flock to Lourdes from all over the world to venerate Our Lady in search of the way that Our Lady seeks to help us come to know and love her Son, the incarnation of divine wisdom, and to live by it as salt and light.
• Many likewise go to Lourdes for healing. 72 people have been officially healed in Lourdes and countless have received unofficial miracles of body and soul there. For that reason, today is the World Day of the Sick. This observance was begun by St. John Paul II in 1993, six years after he visited this Church, and two years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It’s a day on which we pray for and care and commit ourselves to support the sick and those who care for them. But on this day in which we ponder the wealth of divine wisdom, we remember that St. James at the beginning of his epistle reminds us that God “various trials” because the “testing of your faith produces perseverance” and ultimately “wisdom” which God “gives to all generously and ungrudgingly” (James 1:2-5). Jesus himself, the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, learned obedience and human wisdom “through what he suffered” (Heb 5:8). St. Paul, looking at the Cross, said that we see Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). The point of all of these passages and others we could cite is that God helps us to grow in wisdom not principally through sacred study but through sacred suffering, through uniting our sufferings to Christ and his sufferings. Throughout this Basilica we have several images of St. Francis of Assisi, who died 800 years ago this October 3. As he lay dying, he asked that his “book” be brought to him and his Franciscan brothers knowingly brought him the Crucifix, from which St. Francis had told them he had learned all the wisdom he sought to share with them. Today we also remember in this Basilica visited by St. John Paul II what he said about the Christian meaning of suffering in his extraordinary 1984 exhortation Salvifici Doloris, that “suffering, which is present under so many different forms in our human world, is also present in order to unleash love in the human person, that unselfish gift of one’s ‘I’ on behalf of other people, especially those who suffer. The world of human suffering unceasingly calls for, so to speak, another world: the world of human love; and in a certain sense man owes to suffering that unselfish love which stirs in his heart and actions” (29). Pope Leo, in his first Message for today’s observance, focused precisely on the figure of the Good Samaritan by which Jesus, the true Good Samaritan, teaches us how to be neighbor, how to love, how to be like him. As we conclude our conference on the Theology of Gift, we recognize that suffering stretches our capacity of self-giving love, as we are even forced to make the choice of being a Good Samaritan or passing by the other side. Those of us who are charged with helping catalyze people to use their gifts to build up the Church can never neglect the incredible wealth and wisdom involved in those who suffer and how the mystery of suffering can unleash the generosity and care of Good Samaritans who sustain the inn of the Church as we care for all those whom we find wounded, neglected, even left for dead, or otherwise in need.
• Today, at the end of this conference, on this feast of Our Lady and World Day of the Sick, Jesus, who is greater than Solomon, wants to give us an even greater wisdom than he gave Solomon and Solomon passed on to the Queen of Sheba. Jesus gives us his Holy Word and even more importantly he gives us his Holy Spirit to guide us through the gift of wisdom and prudence to know and to live wisdom. But he wants us to desire it, prioritize it, seek it, and live by it. And the more we do, the more we will draw people to the Source of that wisdom, just like Solomon drew the Queen of Sheba, and just like the saints in every age including our own continue to attract people to the God of wisdom who takes up his throne within us. There’s a greater than Solomon here with us today. What we’ve just heard something more valuable $821 million. We are about to do something far more valuable than all the gold, precious stones and spices in the world: enter into a holy communion with the Wisdom-of-God-made-flesh. This is worth traveling across deserts and countries for 2,300 miles. May we in response to these gifts praise God like the Queen of Sheba, give ourselves and all we have in response to God’s lavish generosity, and then go to announce with confidence, together with others whose gifts we unleash, this incredible gift of holy wisdom to the world!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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