Wisdom and Foolishness, 21st Friday (II), August 28, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor
August 28, 2020
1 Cor 1:17-25, Ps 33, Mt 25:1-13

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s readings there is a huge contrast between wisdom and foolishness. In the Gospel, Jesus focuses on the wise and foolish virgins, with the hope that we will learn to imitate the wise and learn from the mistakes of the foolish. In the first reading, St. Paul speaks about how God will destroy the “wisdom of the wise and the learning of the learned,” how he has “made the wisdom of the world foolish” and established the Cross, which is a “scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” as the “power and the wisdom of God,” establishing this “foolishness of God” as “wiser than human wisdom.” And in the Opening Prayer of the Mass, we asked God that “filled with the same spirit” as St. Augustine, whom the Church celebrates today, “we may thirst for you, the sole fount of true wisdom.” So today we learn three different things about true wisdom.
• To understand the message about wisdom from the Gospel, we first need to understand the ancient practice of a Jewish wedding. There were two main stages in a marriage. The first would be the exchange of vows. When this took place, they were married, but they would continue to live apart for a while, even up to a year, while the husband prepared everything to welcome his new wife into his home. It was during this time, for example, that the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary; she was already wedded to Joseph but they had not started to live under the same roof. The second stage was when the bridegroom, the husband, would come to the house of the bride to pick her up and take her to his home. He would be accompanied by all the guests from his side as he went to her home. There he would meet her and all the guests from her side, her bridesmaids and others, who would be waiting for him along the way. Both groups would process back together to his home and when they arrived, they would celebrate the nuptials for eight days with all their friends and family — something they would consider far more enjoyable than leaving all of them behind for a honeymoon. The bridegroom could come at any time to pick up his bride and so people needed to be ready. Before he would come, he would send out a herald who would announce along the path, “Behold the Bridegroom is coming,” but the Husband himself could come within hours, days, up to a week. He could come in the middle of the night. There was a law that said that if one were out at night, one had to have a lamp, which was not only common sense but prevented any ambushes, etc. People could either wait with the bride or accompany the bridegroom — but most would prefer the former because it was less walking! As soon as the Bridegroom took his Bride into his house, the doors really would be shut, to prevent latecomers crashing their party. This wedding tradition, which was universal at Jesus’ time, is still found today in certain parts of the Holy Land and Middle East.
• Jesus used that image as the background to communicate to us how we should be living our life in preparation for the return of Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom, at the end of our life or at the end of the world, whichever comes first. Jesus contrasts five wise bridesmaids versus five foolish ones, wanting us to imitate the lessons we see in the five wise ones. We can focus on three lessons.
  • The first is vigilance for the Bridegroom’s coming. The heralds have already gone out to announce that Jesus is coming. He is already married to his bride the Church, but he’s awaiting the time in which he will be able to celebrate with the wedding banquet that will last not just eight twenty-four hour periods, but be an eternal eighth day (the day of resurrection, the new and eternal “first day of the week”). All of us have been given invitations and are members of the wedding party. Jesus wants us there. But we have to be ready to go with him whenever he arrives. Death, for a Christian, is not meant to be a scary thing. It’s the time when Jesus the Bridegroom comes for us to take us to His home when we will celebrate with him forever. We’re called to await him with eager longing, with great expectation. He wants the lamps of our hearts burning for him, full of the oil of love. For certain, the best way for us to stay alert for the return of the Bridegroom is for us to be ready, with hearts burning with love, for the presence of the Bridegroom now. The more we long for Jesus in the Eucharist, the more we will long to share eternal communion with him. The more we attentively listen to his Word in Sacred Scripture, the more prepared we will be to hear even the softest footsteps of his advent. The more we seek to recognize him in the persons and events of each day, and love and embrace them as we would love and embrace Christ, the more ready we will be ready to embrace Christ when he appears without disguise. Do I long? In my consolations? In my aridity?
  • The second thing Jesus teaches us in the image of the ten bridesmaids is that there are certain things we cannot borrow. Just as the unwise virgins didn’t have enough oil for their own lamps — and oil stands for expectant love for the Lord — so we can’t borrow anyone else’s faith, hope or love. We need to have our own, otherwise we’ll be caught unready and be left outside. St. Augustine could not borrow St. Monica’s faith. All ten virgins have the desire to encounter the Bridegroom, they all show up. Their fidelity is taken for granted. The wise bridesmaids have no inherent natural qualities that automatically put the foolish virgins at a disadvantage. They are all tired and fall asleep. They all have lamps. They all have some oil in the lamps. But the wise virgins have brought extra flasks. St. Augustine in his commentary on this parable said that the virginity shows their abstention from sin, their lamps showed their good works, but the oil manifests their love for God in abstaining from sin and doing their good works, rather than to win the praise of others. To take St. Paul’s image, the oil would be their participation lovingly in receiving Christ’s power and wisdom from the Cross and in picking up their Cross daily and giving themselves over to the Lord. Each one’s oil, in other words, is the gift of each one’s virginity, the first gift of one’s self, the integrity of the person, the purity of heart that longs to see the Bridegroom face to face. The person becomes the gift, the self-offering, this all-inclusive personal act of self-giving in pure love. The unwise have not committed their lives to the extreme; there is some self giving but not to overflowing.
  • The third lesson is that there is a time that can be too late. Certain things cannot be obtained at the last minute. The unwise virgins were caught off guard. They couldn’t borrow oil, so they had to try to obtain some on their own, but they missed the bridegroom and were locked out. They knocked on the door saying, “Lord, lord, open to us.” But then he replied with the words that I think are the saddest and most frightening in all of Sacred Scripture: “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.” The Bridegroom cannot know them because the would-be brides are offering only a borrowed facsimile of love that is not flowing from their heart. Their souls are as hollow as the empty lamps they are carrying. God is looking for one thing in us, the inimitable light that he has wanted to kindle in us and bring forth, the unique flame that can flare up only if we have allowed our hearts and souls to catch the fire of his love. For the Lord to know us, for us to be on time for the wedding banquet, we have to spend our time here getting to know him intimately, as a friend, as a savior, as God. Many of us often put off the most important thing in the life, which is to make God number one in our lives. Jesus tells us that there will be a time when there will be no time left. There will be a time when the door will be shut. Now is the time for us to get to know the Lord so that the Lord may never say, “I don’t know you.” Now is the time for us to prepare for his return. The Lord in today’s Gospel tells us that the wise among us will always be prepared. The moral he gives at the end of today’s parable is crystal clear: “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” To be awake means never to be asleep to God, but always to be alert, full of love, waiting for his return. It means to be living not according to the wisdom of the world but according to God’s power and glory.
• Someone who had sought to live by the wisdom of the world but who eventually came to experience true wisdom is the great doctor of the Church we celebrate today, St. Augustine. He had rejected the faith of his mother and sought it in worldly wisdom, in Manichean philosophy and in the art of rhetoric. His conversion happened when he was 32 in Milan. One day as he was weeping over his state in the back yard of a friend, he heard what sounded like kids singing from a neighboring yard saying, “Tolle et legge,” “Take and read.” He thought it was a strange game for kids to play, but finding no kids, he thought it was a message perhaps from an angel. So he took up the Sacred Scriptures and began to read what his eyes found first. It was a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans that helped him to realize that he needed to stay awake perpetually in God’s presence.  “It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed;  the night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of darkness [and] put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh” (Rom 13:11-14).  That passage seemed like it was written precisely for him — as it indeed it was, for him and for us! — and it gave him the courage from God finally to leave the long night of spiritual sleep and the darkness of the flesh behind and live with the Lord in the day. He received that word “not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God,” and it went to work in him through faith and his interiorization of God’s word was so great that he became one of the greatest commentators of it, in word and witness, in the history of the Church.
• But that was only the first stage of his conversion, when he, like a virgin, needed to abstain from sin and with a lamp do good works. He likewise was helped by the Lord to have flasks of oil, to serve others by feeding them with the Gospel and his very self. When he had returned to Africa after his mother’s death, he had founded a monastery for which he wrote the rule and where he began to write some of his great theological works. It was a perfect situation for him, it seemed, and he was cranking. One day when he had gone to visit a friend in the small city of Hippo, he was attending Mass and the elderly bishop asked the people to pray that the Lord would send him someone who could help him with his preaching duties in Latin, because he had become too infirm to preach. The people looked around and saw in the crowd Augustine, once the greatest rhetoric professor in the empire and now a monk, and proposed him. Augustine didn’t want to have anything to do with that work, which would require giving up a lot of his writing in order to care for ordinary people with ordinary concerns. But he sensed that it was the Lord calling him to be humble and, like the Lord, begin to live for others. “Christ died for all,” he read in St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, “so that those who live should not live for themselves, but for him who died for them” (2 Cor 5:15). And so he made the great sacrifice, being ordained a deacon and a priest and eventually, after the bishop’s death, bishop and successor. And it was from that point that he took on the paternal and maternal love of God as he loved God’s people. And the third stage of his conversion was when he recognized, very late in life, that everything flows from God’s mercy, not from his own works. That God provides the oil if only we allow him to pour in his mercy so that we can pour it out for others. The power and wisdom of the Cross is that it provides everything we need if only we live by it. He was able to write, in one of the most beautiful passages in the history of the saints, about the shift from worldly wisdom to divine, which was a continuous process.  “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.” God wishes to break through the deafness and blindness of us all, to help us live by his wisdom.
• Today as we pray this Mass on St. Augustine’s feast day, we seek to come her like wise virgins awaiting the Bridegroom, the Beauty ever ancient, ever new, who is calling, shouting, breaking through deafness, flashing, shining, dispelling blindness, breathing his fragrance on us, touching us, and stoking our hunger to taste him.  He pours himself out on the Cross in self-giving love and calls us to do this in his memory, to model our life on the mystery of the Cross, to experience its true power of redemptive love and the wisdom of God’s saving ways. Let us, like St. Augustine, and St. Paul before him, embrace Jesus in all his power, wisdom and glory, and, with passion, filled with mercy, live not for ourselves but for him who died for us, and go out to help people come to embrace the bridegroom with lamps and flasks full of the oil of love Jesus pours out here.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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