The Challenge of Wisdom

Dear Friend,

Preparing my homily this week I stumbled on a helpful scholarly insight: ”Wisdom literature speaks of God’s trust that people will discover from experience how they should live.” First off, since our first reading on Sunday is from the Book of Wisdom, it was helpful to be reminded that the Bible is a collection of many different kinds of literature, all of them “wise” in their own way - history, poetry, prophetic pronouncements and whole books of law. But there was something else: the wisdom books - such as Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Song of Songs - have a distinctive tone which, possibly more than any other kind of biblical literature can help me understand St. Francis. 

Based on that initial quote, you could put it this way: St. Francis’s faith was humbly to place his trust in God’s trust in him - that he (Francis) would discover what to do and how he was to do it. (Philosophers would call this an inductive method.)

No doubt, Francis was highly motivated by the summons Jesus gave his disciples: Go out into the whole world and preach (“taking nothing for their journey”), but from then on it was all about “learning as you go”, facing the unexpected, listening to the Spirit, adapting, and growing - all the way to his death bed. It is a movement, as the Secular Franciscans like to say, from Gospel to life, and from life to the Gospel. 

The young man who appears in the Gospel this week seems to be asking Jesus for an answer or maybe a guidebook. Instead, he receives a challenge to let go of everything and place his trust in God to show him what to do.  The challenge of wisdom is too much for him and sometimes, truthfully, it’s too much for me too!  

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan, ofm, Pastor