Unleashing God’s Wisdom, 5th Wednesday (II), February 12, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Seminary, Detroit, MI
Archdiocese of Detroit, Leadership Retreat
Wednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
February 12, 2020
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: 

• As we ponder today ways to make the new evangelization more practical and effective through the active participation of each of one of us, we have the grace to see in today’s readings how great is the gift we’re blessed to offer and how God is calling us to offer that gift from the heart.
• In the first reading today, 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 of about 2,300 miles — if you’re wondering how far that it, it’s the distance it would take to walk between Detroit and Los Angeles! — 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 please 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 during sleep who had in the middle of the night 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. One woman was fine with the solution. The other 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, awarded the child to the true mom. 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.”
• And so it was in this 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 them that she had brought along her 2,200 mile journey in her caravan. The price of gold this morning is $1,573.30 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 proud, time $1,573.30 per ounce. Get ready: just in money she gave $226,555,200. 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 than that enormous fortune.
• 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 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.
• Pope Francis writes beautiful in The Joy of the Gospel, “We have a treasure of life and love” and are “convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. …We know well,” he says, “that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything. This is why we evangelize.” We have a treasure that we cannot bury in the ground. We are called to invest it to make five talents from five, or 120 gold talents from 120.
• But for us to share the faith effectively, we can’t just be imparting discarnate proverbs as spiritual consiglieri. 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 the Jews, of their hands, their cups, jugs, kettles, beds and so many other objects, all human hygienic traditions that hadn’t been revealed by God but that had become a collective neurosis for the Pharisees in Jesus’ day 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, so that we might see God. 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 even those with IQs north of 160, like we see, often, among those in the academy, or in positions of leadership in politics or culture. But it can impact everyone.
• 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 weather, or whether we’re filling our interior with the types of sinful desires Jesus describes.
• 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 it’s up to us to desire it, to prioritize it, to seek it, to 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. What we’ve just heard something more valuable $227 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 2300 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 this incredible gift of holy wisdom to the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: